New Worlds #056v19 (1957 02)

No.

\EW WORLDS

— PROFILES —

Frank

Bryning

Queensland

Australia

Francis Bertram Bryning is undoubtedly Australians
foremost science fiction author having first become
interested in the genre as long ago as 1928 when he bought
a copy of Amazing Stories and found E. E. Smith’s The
Skylark Of Space inside® From then on he became a con-
firmed addict and a significant part of his private library
consists of a moderate collection of selected science fiction*
Born in Melbourne some 45 years ago he grew up in
the Yarra Valley and as a schoolboy became much more
proficient in sports and athletics than in general scholastic
attainment. However.., he says, “ I was most fortunate in
my parents, whose broad interests and love of books led
me naturally into becoming a wide and avid reader* As
a boy I was well acquainted with Verne, Wells, Shaw,
Bellamy, Butler, Swift, London, Sinclair, Twain, and
numerous less eminent authors. Many of them were of
progressive and speculative outlook, and some of their
works can now be claimed as science fiction.”

Guest ©f Honour at the Fifth Australian S-F Conven-
tion which was held in Melbourne on December 8th and
9th at the close of the Olympic Games, he is a journalist
by profession, editing a monthly building trade journal.
As a freelance he has contributed to many Australian
publications over the past twenty years and more recently
has had great success in both the American and British
markets with science fiction.

He has always been interested in science— -its achieve-
ments and possibilities— and while at University High
School in Melbourne he joined a science club founded by
fellow schoolboy Harrie Massey, now known as Dr. H. S.
W. Massey of British wave mechanics and nuclear physics
fame. More recently, in 1952, he became a founder
member of the Brisbane Science Fiction Group, which
originated in Ms home.

VOLUME 19

jNEUJ WORLDS]

^SCIENCE FICTION-^

No. 56

MONTHLY

FEBRUARY 1957

CONTENTS

Novelette :
UNIT

Short Stories :
ON THE AVERAGE
THE GREATER IDEAL
ALONE
GUESS WHO ?

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE

THE WINDOWS

Article :

CONTRA-TERRENE MATTER

Features :
EDITORIAL
THE LITERARY LINE-UP

by J. T. McIntosh 4

by Frank B. Bryning 53

by Alan Guthrie 65

by Bertram Chandler 72

by Philip E. High 88

by James White i QO

by Kenneth Johns 81

by John Cornell 2

64

Editor : JOHN CARNELL

Cover : TERRY Interiors : LEWIS, JACKSON and EDDIE

TWO SHILLINGS

Subscription Rates

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United States of America, 12 issues $4.00 post free
Published on the last Friday of each month by

NOVA PUBLICATIONS LTD., 2 Arundel Street, Strand, London, W.C.2.

All characters in these stories are purely fictitious and any resemblance to living persons it
entirely coincidental. No responsibility is accepced for material submitted for publication
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with ail MSS.

Printed in England by The Rugby Advertiser, Albert Street, Rugby

2

NEW WORLDS

S-F and Education

For many years one of the most controversial subjects con-
nected with science fiction has been whether the genre has any
educational value whatsoever, or whether like the detective and
adventure story it is merely a form of entertainment, not intending
to teach its readers anything about scientific matters. Indeed,
this argument can be traced back as far as the early 1930’s when
Hugo Gernsback, founder of modern magazine science fiction,
first termed it “ sugar-coated science.”

Since 1948 the controversy has been discussed in a quiet
manner throughout the pages of innumerable sedate literary
journals, has been white-washed on the radio and ham-strung
on TV — it was the leading question given to Dr. Tom Gold
the astronomer, and myself on ITV last March — although quitg
recently the subject was partially vindicated by Dr. J. Bronowski
on BBC TV “ Brains Trust ” while the rest of the panel groped
blindly in the dark at a complete loss as to what the subject
matter was about.

It will, I suppose, remain a controversial subject indefinitely,
although the crude question “ Do you expect to make scientists
out of the young people who read science fiction ?” no longer
applies in this wakening atomic age. Only a person outside the
regular reading or writing of science fiction would pose such a
stupid question, because neither publishers, editors or writers
have ever suggested that the genre develops scientific ‘ ability.’
Undoubtedly, however, it does create an ‘ awareness ’ of the
fact that we are living in a scientific age, that scientific knowledge
is becoming more and more available to the general public
through the use of popular articles in the general press, and
that with the expansion of modern needs more technicians are
being required. Scientific establishments are, in fact, going out
of their way to induce and help the youth of today to turn to a
technical career.

We know that during recent years more care and accuracy
has been put into the writing of good science fiction stories than
at any time in the history of the medium. Many of the world’s
foremost writers of this type of fiction are themselves scientists
or technicians by profession, writing science fiction as an interest-
ing and lucrative hobby. Others are professional writers who
spend weeks of research checking data in reference books before
committing an idea to paper. Even the magazine editors have

EDITORIAL

3

to keep in constant touch with all branches of scientific develop-
ment to ensure that the authors do not overstep the bounds of
credible possibility.

While no reasonably minded person will expect that today’s
youth by reading science fiction are likely to learn a great deal
of science or have their steps directed towards a scientific career,
it is reasonable to assume that such logically presented stories
in fictional form will whet the enquiring mind of the reader into
discovering more about the technological advances we are making
in all branches of scientific development.

Science fiction also has a place in the lives of the already
technically trained, probably as a form of mental relaxation
closely allied to their working life. Obviously not inspirational
— no scientist is likely to read a story concerning a Time machine
and then sit down and work out the plans for such a machine,
but he is likely to enjoy reading about such an improbability
after a frustrating day in the laboratory or workshop. Is it so
surprising that many doctors, engineers, analytical chemists,
radio, radar, and electronics experts the world over relax with
science fiction ?

I like the comments of author Isaac Asimov, writing in an
American technical journal concerning the respectability of
brains being a by-product of science fiction. “ Scientific re-
search,” he writes, “ is presented (in science fiction) almost
invariably as an exciting and thrilling process ; its usual ends
as both good in themselves and good for mankind ; its heroes
as intelligent people to be admired and respected.

“ Naturally, science fiction writers do not deliberately go about
doing this. If they did it deliberately, the chances are that their
stories would play second fiddle to their propaganda and prove
quite unpublishable ; or if published, quite boring, and thus do
more harm than good.

“ It merely happens that this sort of thing comes about almost
unwittingly. However much a science fiction writer may think
primarily of writing a good story and secondarily of making an
honest living, he inevitably finds that every so often he cannot
escape making intelligence, education, even a scientific career,
attractive.”

The present generations are growing up fully conscious of
the part scientific experimentation plays in our daily lives —
science fiction may not be the keystone to scientific knowledge
but at least it is the shop window of the world of To-morrow.

John Cornell.

UNIT

5

Readers who enjoyed J. T. McIntosh's story *' Empath ” in
the August I95i New Worlds will find the following story
equally as good and based upon a subject somewhat similar
in theory — this time dealing with the integration of a number
of minds to work as a single unit.

c

N

I

T

By J. T. McIntosh

Illustrated by LEWIS

I

When A.D. called me on the phone and invited me to lunch
I knew he wanted something. I’d known A.D. a long time,
quite long enough to know when he was merely being friendly
and when he had something up his sleeve.

A. D. Young was something in the U.A., a very important
international octopus whose tentacles reached almost all the
settlements in the galaxy. What he did in the organisation I
didn’t know, but I suspected he was something more than a
forty-five-year-old office boy. His approach smelled as if he
was offering me a job.

I was interested, because at the time I didn’t have a job.
And I’d reached the age of being concerned over being out of
work. Oh, I had the odd thousand or two in my bank account,
and if I starved it would be the first time. It wasn’t in that way
I was worried.

6

NEW WORLDS

The trouble is, as you get older you learn more, you get
better at things, and you expect more out of life. I was the
same age as A.D. — forty-five, unmarried, a high grade executive
with no executions scheduled. Twenty years since I’d been
happy to take any job that was going at any salary, just for the
hell of it, but now I’d got used to four good meals a day and
various other things that demand a good fat four-figure income.

At the moment I had no income at all. I shouldn’t have told
Bentley what I thought of him. Or if I’d told him, I shouldn’t
have told him so he understood. Or if I’d told him so he under-
stood I should have waited until I was in a position to fire him
instead of having him fire me.

I think that makes my interest in A.D.’s proposition clear.
I wasn’t much interested in the U.A., not at the time. I was
interested in anything paying not less than .£5,000 a year.

When I saw him, A.D. came straight to the point. “ I know
you’re free, Edgar,” he said. “ I checked. How about taking
a job with the U.A.? ”

“ The U.A.? ” I said, as if I’d never heard of it before. •

“ Unit Authority,” said A.D. helpfully.

“ You’ve got the wrong number, A.D.,” I told him. “ I’m
quite satisfied with myself as I am.”

“ I don’t mean as a Uniteer. I mean as a Unit Father.”

I liked the idea. It made A.D.’s very good cigar taste even
better. Unit Fathers were very important people. I’d get my
£5,000. I showed no signs of my interest, however.

“ Don’t bother to be coy,” said A.D. “ You get paid the
same whether you need the job or not.”

“ I don’t need the job,” I retorted. “ And what gives you the
idea I’m so concerned about money ? ”

“ Observation,” said A.D. drily.

There was no answer to that so I didn’t look for one. “ What
sort of job would my Unit be doing ?” I asked cautiously. “And
would it be here on Earth or in some God-forsaken hole at the
other end of the galaxy ? ”

A.D. shook his head. “ You don’t get told that. Your Unit
might be running a factory right here ... or it might be sent
to Perryon.”

“ Perryon,” I murmured. “ That’s certainly a God-forsaken
hole, from what I’ve heard of it.”

“ I’m surprised you’ve heard of it.”

“ Oh, I know this and that,” I said. “ Know the alphabet
and everything.” But still I wasn’t satisfied. Something still
smelled. It wasn’t necessarily a bad smell, just a smell.

UNIT

7

“ You’ve got something else in mind, A.D.,” I said. “ You
never waste a stone on anything less than three birds. I like to
know what I’m letting myself in for. Come on, give.”

“ You’d have to know anyway,” said A.D., unperturbed. “ I
know you, Edgar. On the right you carry your wallet, and on
the left you carry your heart. You never let one get the better
of the other. I understand that. You’ll be a good Unit Father.
You’ve got the right mixture of hard-headedness and humanity.”

“ I weep tears of gratitude,” I said. “ Now what’s the build-
up for ? ”

“ My daughter,” said A.D. quietly, “ is volunteering for a
Unit. Today.”

“ What for ? ” I asked, astonished.

“ That doesn’t matter. What does matter is this — I can’t
stop her, and when she’s a Uniteer she won’t know who she
was before. I may never see her again. I certainly won’t be
allowed to tell her I’m her father. I won’t be able to do anything
for her.”

He paused. I didn’t say anything.

“ After Lorraine has volunteered for a Unit,” A.D. went on,
“ she and I will be nothing to each other. I’ll be able to pull
strings to find out how she’s getting on. I may be able to think
of some excuse to meet her at the U.A. depot now and then.
But that’s all. Now do you understand ? ”

I nodded.

“ I won’t see you very often either,” A.D. said. “ But at
least I’ll know you’re looking after the Unit Lorraine will be in.
That’s something.”

“ You’ll be able to swing that ? ” I asked curiously.

“ Yes.”

I paused, thinking it over. I didn’t offer A.D. my sympathy.
A.D. wasn’t the kind of man who wanted or needed sympathy.

I had identified all the smells now. “ That’s the three birds,”
I ruminated. “ One, your old friend is out of a job and you
can give him one. Two, you need Unit Fathers anyway. Three,
you want someone to keep an eye on Lorraine after she’s a
Uniteer.”

“ Four,” said A.D., “ you don’t sell out. You know that if
you spread it around that I told you where your Unit was going
and fixed things so that my daughter was assigned to a Unit
headed by a friend of mine, I’d be due for a batn in boiling oil.
But you’ll keep it to yourself.”

“ Okay,” I said. “ To all four.”

8

NEW WORLDS

“ You’ll do it ? ”

“ I’ll do it. My wallet has just persuaded my heart — or the
other way round.”

So we went down to the Unit depot and I became a father.

That afternoon I watched my children coming in. Coming
in, not being born. It’s time we dropped that metaphor.

I sat with a technician behind one-way glass and watched a
psychologist interviewing people. I’d been interviewed too. I’d
passed as a Unit Father, sumtna cum laude. They told me I
should have been a Unit Father long ago. I told them I’d never
happened to meet the right woman. They looked as if they’d
heard that one before.

I didn’t see A.D. around the place. He was one of the men
behind the scenes, apparently. He had certainly pulled the right
strings, for Lorraine was the first person I saw interviewed.

I’d met Lorraine once or twice, usually when she was just
on the point of dashing off somewhere. We were no more than
names to each other.

In fact it was only when I had time for a long, steady stare
at her, behind the glass in the U.A. depot, that I realised Lorraine
was a beauty. She had the kind of face and figure that had to
grow on you before you suddenly realised how lovely the girl
was.

Her nose was too small and her forehead too high. She
looked too flat until she got excited or angry, and then you saw
that she had the usual dimensions after ail.

“Now tell me, Miss Young,” said the psychologist pleasantly,
“just why are you here ? ”

“ Do I have to tell you that ? ” Lorraine asked, biting her lip.

“ No. But we’ll find out anyway, in the tests.”

She took another bite. Then she looked up suddenly, defiantly.
“ Well, if you must know,” she said, “ it’s this or suicide.”

She expected to shock the psychologist, but she should have
known better. In the first place, he was a good psychologist,
and in the second, he saw scores of people every week who had
come to volunteer for a Unit because it was that or suicide.

He nodded. “ Why ? ” he asked simply.

“ I’ve lost the man I’m in love with,” she said.

He didn’t look surprised or ask if it was that serious. Obviously
it was that serious, or she wouldn’t be here. He wasn’t neces-
sarily believing what she was saying anyway. It would all come
out, as he’d already said, in the tests.

UNIT

9

“ We want volunteers, Miss Young,” said the psychologist,
“ but we don’t want people who have come here on impulse
and will regret it later. If you — ”

“ I won’t go back on it.”

“ It’s not that. You can’t. Are you sure that ... in three
months’ time, say, you’d still want to do this ? ”

“ In three months’ time,” said Lorraine bitterly, “ I wouldn’t
be around to volunteer for a Unit.”

“ When did this happen, Miss Young ? I mean, how long
have you — ”

“ We broke up two weeks ago.”

“ That’s a fair time,” the psychologist admitted. “ If you’re
quite sure, I can’t refuse to accept you.”

“ I’m quite sure.”

After that came the preliminary testing, and I saw most of
that too. It took a long time, and after a while the technician
beside me went away and left me to watch alone. I was interested
because it was Lorraine.

I was wondering how far A.D. had stepped out of line in
arranging for me to be the Father of the Unit his daughter was
assigned to. Not far, I guessed. Though he’d said if it was
found out he’d be due for a bath in boiling oil, A.D. was never
that careless. He didn’t do things that were going to land him
in hot water — or boiling oil.

After all, he hadn’t passed me as a Unit Father. He’d simply
got me to come along, and it happened to be on the day when
Lorraine came in to volunteer, if anyone ever complained of
string-pulling A.D. would have a good story ready, I knew.

I wondered what he was like as a father. Was it his fault
that at twenty-two Lorraine felt her life was a wreck ? Perhaps,
I thought, but only because she’d been a little spoiled. She’d
always had everything she wanted, and so it seemed like the
end of the world when a man she wanted didn’t want her.

I learned a lot about Lorraine as I watched her being tested
by every conceivable psychological test — intelligence, stability,
aptitude, personality, psychosomatic, word-association, every-
thing I’d heard of and a few I hadn’t.

Then I realised, as I should have done long ago, that all this
didn’t matter. Lorraine as she was now was going to cease to
exist in a few minutes or hours, and the Lorraine I was going
to know would only begin to grow after that.

I got up and followed the technician. Lorraine was still doing
the exha tivc psychological tests.

IO

NEW WORLDS

Though it was now late afternoon, the technician told me that
I’d see the completion of my Unit before the depot closed for
the day. It was open until twelve o’clock, and it did most of
its business, so the technician told me, in the evening. People
who meant to volunteer for a Unit on a certain day kept leaving
it later and later until at last they had to go or leave it until the
next day.

The next person I saw being interviewed was Dick Lowson.
That wasn’t his name, but it was the name he was given later,
the name under which I knew him.

Men and women who join Units have to make a clean break
with their previous life. They’re usually given new names and
sometimes even new faces. Lorraine’s Christian name wasn’t
changed, for some reason, but her surname was. She became
Lorraine Waterson — not that that matters.

Dick was a tall, thin man of about thirty, with hair going out
like the tide. He was moody, dreamy, indifferent.

“ How would you describe your problem, yourself ? ” the
psychologist asked.

Dick stared straight at us, gathering his thoughts. I moved
uncomfortably. “ He can’t see us,” the technician murmured.
“ He’s just staring into space.”

“ How many people have you got behind that glass ? ” Dick
asked. He shrugged and turned away. “ Doesn’t make any
difference. Bring them in here if you like. How would I
describe my problem — does that matter ? ”

“ Yes,” said the psychologist.

Dick shrugged. “ All right, I’ll try to tell you. I was a boy
wonder. Straight A’s in every subject, and pretty good outside
University too. Plenty of money from spare-time jobs, social
success, girls ... I had six girls on a string when I was fifteen
— wonder why I bothered. By the time I was twenty I’d done
it ail. For seven or eight years I did it all over again, getting
less and less fun out of it — -making money, climbing on the
next man’s back, winning games, buying things, selling things.
Last three years I haven’t bothered doing anything very much.
Nothing seems worth while.”

He sighed. “ Now clean the slate and let me start over again.”

The psychologist nodded. “ Your IQ’s very high,” he com-
mented.

“ Sure. Aren’t I lucky ? Everybody wants to be smart. A
fundamental error. If you’re dumb, things are simple. The
smarter you are, the more complicated things get. Are you
going to make me dumb ? ”

UNIT

ii

“ No. You’ll be the brains of a Unit.”

“ Thanks for nothing.”

“ And you’ll like it.”

“ Good. What do I do now ? ”

The psychologist told him what to do now.

In the dark passageway- 1 murmured : “ That must be awful.”
“ What must be awful ? ” the technician asked.

“ Having done everything before you’re thirty.”

“ He hasn’t done everything. He just thinks he has.”

“ Well, it must be awful to think you’ve done everything
before you’re thirty.”

“ Neurosis,” said the technician. “ We’ll soon fix that.”

“ What exactly is this clearing process ? ”

“ We just sponge everything off the brain. Experience,
memories, language, neurosis — the lot. That leaves capacity
and damn little else. Then we can train them right.”

“ Sounds a bit inhuman.”

“ Nonsense. Uniteers are happier, saner, and much more
useful than anyone else. Far more than you and me.”

“ Then why don’t we go and volunteer ? ”

The technician grinned. “ Why do Christians stay out of
heaven as long as they can ? ”

I saw a lot of people being interviewed, and naturally not
many of them were assigned to my Unit. The depot handled
about twenty people a day, four Units.

I’m ignoring those who weren’t assigned to my group. I soon
forgot the others anyway. All of them, except Lorraine and
Helen, got new names later. Perhaps it wasn’t worth while
changing a name like Helen — there’s so many of them.

Helen would have been a very beautiful girl but for one thing.
It was a big thing, though.

Her face was less alive than a face on a magazine cover. Her
changes of expression were even deader. Smile : pull cheek
muscles. Laugh : open mouth, oscillate vocal cords. Frown :
corrugate forehead. A robot could have done it as well.

“ What do you mean, are the police after me ? ” she demanded.
“ Why should the police be after me ? ”

“ All that concerns us,” said the psychologist, “ is how far
they are after you.”

He was a good psychologist. He knew what to say to make
contact.

12

NEW WORLDS

Helen cooled down. “You mean you don’t care?”

“ Not in the least. After you’re cleared you can’t possibly
have criminal tendencies.”

“ Why, you louse, are you suggesting I — ”

“ No, I’m not suggesting anything. How far behind you are
the police ? ”

“ A long way. But they might catch up,” Helen admitted.
“ Say, if clearing removes criminal tendencies, how come
criminals can’t volunteer ? ”

“ They can, after they’ve served their sentences. We’re not
allowed to take criminals here as an alternative to prison. If
we did, why, anybody could do anything he liked and volunteer
for a Unit when he was caught, to avoid the jail sentence.”

“ I get it,” said Helen. “ Well, I’m in the clear.” She looked
thoughtful. “ I wonder what I’ll be like afterwards ? ”

“ Wonderful,” said the psychologist.

“ Thanks,” she said. “ I guess you don’t mean it, but thanks
anyway.”

After Helen came Brent.

Brent was a young, healthy, handsome moron. Society had
warped him, but even in his original state he couldn’t have been
much of an asset to himself or anybody else.

“ What good’s he going to be ?” I asked, rather resenting
Brent’s presence in my Unit. Lorraine, Dick and even Helen
had all had something I could appreciate, but this big, good-
looking idiot didn’t strike me as valuable material.

“ You ought to know,” said the technician reprovingly, “ that
you can’t get anything done without a certain amount of stupidity
and ignorance.”

I looked at him sharply, scenting sarcasm, but the only light
where we were was from the room beyond, heavily filtered, and
I couldn’t tell whether he meant what he said or not.

There was a long pause after Brent. People were interviewed,
but the psychologist never made the sign to warn us that the
person being interviewed was a possible recruit for my Unit.

“ May take a while,” the technician whispered. “ It’s always
toward the end that forming a Unit gets difficult. In the begin-
ning anyone will do. It’s like putting five cakes in a box. The
first four can be almost any size, but the last has to be just the
right size and shape.”

“ How about me ?” I asked. “ What am I ? ”

“ The box,” said the technician.

UNIT

*3

I thought of asking why so comparatively little trouble was
taken over the Unit Fathers, why all the Uniteers were thoroughly
cleared and then trained for weeks, emerging as something in
the order of supermen, while the Unit Father, theoretically at
least the boss of the whole show, was just an ordinary human
being, tested only briefly and given no psychological repair-work
at all. However, I didn’t have to ask. I could guess.

People are still suspicious of the Units. They use them, but
they don’t entirely trust them. There’s a flavour of inhumanity
about the whole system. The public doesn’t like being at the
mercy of people whose brains have been tampered with.

Hence the Unit Fathers — essentially ordinary human beings,
in no way processed, cleared or otherwise mentally modified.
A brake on the supernormal Uniteers. A safeguard. A token
to show that ordinary people are the masters, Units the servants.

Our last member came in just before the depot closed. I
noted the psychologist’s sign and leaned forward eagerly.

lone was a snub-nosed, wistful, reckless, restless creature
whom I liked at sight. I wondered why a girl like lone should
be volunteering for a Unit — at nineteen.

“ I won’t be altogether different, will I ? ” she asked wistfully.
“ I like some things about the way I am now.”

“ The saner people are when they come in here,” said the
psychologist, “ the less they change.”

“ I don’t have to have my parents’ consent, do I ? ”

“ Not now. That was changed a couple of years ago. Would
your parents be against this ? ”

“ My parents are against everything,” said lone with a brief
flash of bitterness.

So that was it. Later tests amplified this hint,
lone was an unwanted child. And nineteen years after
arriving unwanted she volunteered for a Unit. It made sense.

Lorraine and lone represented the two opposites who both
landed up in Units quite often. The spoiled children, the
children so protected from the world that when the world finally
kicked them in the teeth it was an incredible, crippling shock.
And the unwanted children, the children who had been brought
up by indifferent parents and who had realised early that the
love which other children took for granted was not for them.
The first group over-confident, expecting too much of life. The
second group expecting and finding too little.

Now that my Unit was complete I reviewed it mentally.

H

NEW WORLDS

Lorraine, a girl who had always had everything she wanted,
and let herself be broken to pieces the first time she wanted
something and the world said no.

Dick, a man bored with a life in which things had come too
easily and too early.

Helen, without moral sense or feminine warmth, hard as
diamond.

Brent, bruised by a world in which everybody was quicker
and cleverer than he was.

And lone, a girl who should have been loved and admired
but had always been unwanted and resented.

It was a group of useless people, five men and women who
had grappled with the world and with life and had failed.

Five failures — and they were going to blend into something
new, wonderful and perfect.

I saw quite a lot of the clearing and re-training processes.
I didn’t see A.D. again — he was being careful — and he didn’t
see Lorraine. He had known he wouldn’t, of course. After
the first day she wouldn’t have known him anyway.

The ordinary human being’s mind is an overgrown wilderness.
There are beautiful flowers and trees in it, but none of the
flowers are as tough as the weeds. The weeds tangle up huge
areas and lurk in the shadows of the loveliest plants and shrubs.
They suck most of the nourishment from the soil and often
strangle the more delicate blooms. Sometimes when you look
into such a jungle you can see nothing but weeds.

Psychiatry for centuries waged a hopeless war on the weeds.
Psychiatrists could cut a weed down, but that was like trying to
stop the sea with a cardboard box.

What could be done, however, was clear the wilderness and
start again.

As a reversed current prevents permanent magnetism being
stored in a piece of equipment, a certain artificial neural current
could cancel out everything in a mind — not by painting over
what was there already, but by balancing it, nullifying it, totally
erasing it. It was like re-recording on magnetic tape.

And the cleared mind was capable of wonderful things. It
learned rapidly and correctly. No longer did it know' that blonde
men hit you. Its calculations for the safety of the body it con-
trolled weren’t biased by the command when there’s danger
always jump left. It wasn’t necessary any more for men to fall'
in love with every woman who reminded them of their mothers.

UNIT

IS

When a particular pattern of light and shade fell on their eyes
women no longer had sickening, blinding migraine.

All this wouldn’t have been much good if the weeds had been
able to spring up rapidly again.

They didn’t. The weeds of the mind gain strength with age.
A weed could grow in a cleared mind, but it would be thirty
years before it could take firm hold. And usually adults, unlike
children, were able to recognize these weeds for what they were
and pull them out easily, long before they became a danger.

The Units had grown out of this clearing process.

As mankind’s boundaries were set wider and wider, as tech-
nology and education and social science and economics and
politics and the human span of life grew, as man outgrew the
planets and moved out into the galaxy, the task of directing
things became more and more difficult and complex.

More electronic brains were used every week, but on the
whole cybernetics flopped. Getting the right answer from an
electronic brain depended on punching the right buttons.
Cybernetics helped to do things, it could never do them.

Hence the Units. Five cleared human beings, specially
trained for a job and trained to work together, each to perform
some function and trust the other four to do the rest, could do
things no electronic brain could do and no group of a thousand
individuals could do.

You see, the Units never made mistakes. That sounds like
an exaggeration, but it isn’t. When they did things which turned
out to be wrong, subsequent investigation showed that their
decision had still been right. Essential information might have
been missing. Immediate action might have been called for on a
basis of guesswork. The choice might have been among half
a dozen courses of action each of which was wrong. Or they
might have done the thing too late. Units could make that
kind of mistake — their timing could be wrong. But being reason-
able, being ioo per cent sane, being complete, being trained,
being a Unit, no Unit could be wrong if it tried.

The Unit Fathers were kind of team managers. Sometimes
a Unit on its own was too refined an instrument for ordinary
things like booking accommodation, getting on a train, or taking
a day off. Leaving a Unit to attend to such things was like using
a scalpel to cut bread.

It wasn’t just that a bread-knife could do the job as well. A
bread-knife could do the job a whole lot better.

Hence me, Unit Father— bread-knife.

i6

NEW WORLDS

It took only three or four months to train a Unit. That
included all the general information the Uniteers individually
had to have about life. True, there were enormous gaps, but
only gaps which could quickly and quite easily be filled.

At the end of three months my Unit and I were on a ship
bound for Perryon.

II

There is plenty of time to get to know people on spaceship
trips. None of them are longer than about two months, but
two months is a long time when you have nothing to do but
eat and sleep.

On ocean trips at least you can play tennis and swim and lean
on the rail. In a spaceship the most exciting game you can
play is chess. Playing cards isn’t impossible, but the technique
of handling metal cards and sliding them over the magnetized
table destroys most players’ concentration.

We hadn’t really met socially before the trip. The five who
made up the Unit proper had been trained to work with each
other and I’d seen them all at every stage from birth to maturity,
so to speak. Yet it was only on the Violin Song that we had
time to sit together and get to know each other.

The first day out of New York I had morning coffee with
Dick.

“ Let’s get to business,” he said briskly. “ As I understand
it, we’re being sent to Perryon to arbitrate between the two
main factions there. But the real reason is because Perryon
might be the base of the Traders. That right ? ”

I was a little startled by this blunt statement. In essence it
was correct, but when I’d been told about it the matter hadn’t
been reduced to its essentials like this.

“ Correct,” I said.

“ If we find that’s so, that Perryon is the Traders’ base, what
are we supposed to do about it ? ”

“ Just ‘ take appropriate action,’ ” I said.

Dick nodded. “ Carte blanche. That’s good. Okay, I'm
going to check on Perryon. I’ve got a dozen books. Be seeing
you.”

He shot himself across the saloon, disdaining the hand-holds.

This, then, was the new, dynamic Dick, the brains of my
Unit. A very single-minded young man.

UNIT

17

He’d covered a lot in a few words. Officially we were going
to Perryon as arbitrators. Perryon, like many another place at
many another time, had a North-South squabble going on,
about this, that and the next thing. My Unit was taking the
place of a governor, with all the governor’s power and far more
than the governor’s responsibilities.

Probably even if the question of the Traders hadn’t arisen a
Unit would have been sent to do this job. It was about time
that Perryon, an impecunious, inhospitable, though climatically
mild world, had its first Unit.

The Traders, or Free Traders, were smugglers.

Before space travel tvas an accomplished fact it had always
been assumed that if we ever did get to the planets and to other

i8

NEW WORLDS

stars freight rates would be fantastically high. Why this was
assumed isn’t clear. The kind of ships we use cost nothing to
run and not very much to service. Two months is a long run,
most journeys taking less time. Hold space is nothing in the
star lanes. It costs very little more to transport things between
Earth and Arcturus than between Paris and New York. In
some cases it actually costs less to move things light-years be-
tween worlds than a few hundred miles on Earth, depending on
how much handling is needed.

This led to difficulties. Newly-settled planets didn’t bother
to develop certain industries. It wasn’t worth while when the
products of New York, Berlin and London cost only a little
more than they cost in New York, Berlin and London.

This in turn led to economic chaos. Capital which was spent
on the colonies didn’t stay in the colonies, it came back — to
traders, not to the investors. Demand for many kinds of goods
began to exceed the supply. Earth hadn’t the space to expand
any more ; the colonies had, and didn’t use it.

So heavy tariffs went on most goods being exported to the
colonies. Not on newspapers, magazines, books, films, gramo-
phone records, but on washing-machines, cars, radio sets,
furniture, typewriters, clothes. The tariff wasn’t imposed to
protect local industries, it was imposed to force local industries
to start.

A new balance was achieved.

Then, of course, smuggling started. It was too easy. Any-
one who had a ship could pack it full of, say, washing-machines
and sell them at a profit of £20 per machine on some planet
where the duty-protected washing-machines were expensive and
not very good. Three thousand washing-machines at £20 clear
profit a time is £ 60,000 . -The expenses of the trip could be as
low as £5,000.

Any way you looked at it, the Traders were on to a good thing.

The chances that Perryon was the Traders’ base weren’t high.
But it was known they had to have a base somewhere, on some
settled planet. It was also known their base couldn’t be Earth.

With the kind of space travel we used, the only places anyone
could get to were the places everyone could get to. It was as
if ail travel were by railroad — where the lines went, any train
could go. Where they didn’t go, no train could go.

Part of our job was to check Perryon. It was one of nearly
fifty worlds on which the Traders’ base might be.

UNIT

19

\

Now by stressing and explaining it like this, I’ve given that
angle far more importance than it had for us at the time. As
far as we were concerned, it was an incidental possibility, some-
thing most unlikely to concern us. We were acting on a lead,
like more than forty other groups acting on the same lead. For
all of us, except one, the lead would turn out to be false.

Naturally we didn’t expect to be the one.

While I was still sitting there — I say sitting because that’s
easy to say, not because it’s accurate — Lorraine came through,
using the handholds. She carried a towel and a clean fallsuit,
apparently on her way to have a bath.

When she saw me, however, she pulled herself over beside
me and strapped herself about the middle, fastening her towel
on another strap.

“ Say, Edgar,” she began. “ You knew me before, didn’t
you ? ”

“ Before you volunteered for a Unit ? ” I asked. Obviously
that was what she meant, but I wanted time to consider my
answer.

“ Yes. What was I like ? ”

She meant, compared with what she was like now.

I looked at her. Physically, of course, she was exactly the
same, except perhaps that she was a shade more alert now than
she had been before, a little easier and more assured in her
manner, and held herself more proudly.

Temperamentally she wasn’t the same girl. She was serene
now, but not serene-placid, more serene-enthusiastic. She had
developed a sense of humour she had shown no sign of having
before.

“ Don’t act as if it were top secret information,” she said.
“ It isn’t. They’d have told me at the depot, but they’d have
told me just what they wanted me to know. Why did I
volunteer ? ”

“ You were going to commit suicide otherwise,” I said.

“ No ! ” she exclaimed incredulously. “ What for ? ”

“ A man.”

“ Good God. I must have been crazy. They should have
told me about that. Did you know the man ? ”

“ No.”

“ Did you know me well ? ”

“ No.”

“ You’re not much help,” Lorraine complained.

20

NEW WORLDS

“ Uniteers aren’t supposed to be interested in their previous
history,” I said.

“ Oh, I’m not desperate to know about mine,” Lorraine
remarked, shrugging her shoulders. “ Only they might tell us
a little more.” A thought struck her. She looked startled. “ I
don’t even know whether I’m a virgin or not ! ”

I must have reacted violently, for she laughed in my face.

“ Never mind,” she said, “ I can find out. But that’s the
kind of thing I mean. Was I rich or poor, sociable or lonely,
sought after or ignored ? Did men write sonnets to me or pre-
tend not to see me in the street ? Was I a good girl or a loose
woman ? ”

“ Forget it,” I said. “ It doesn’t matter.”

“ No, I guess it doesn’t,” she agreed mildly. “ Tell me one
tiling, though. Which do you prefer — the girl I am now or
the girl I was ? ”

“ The girl you are now,” I said instantly.

She smiled and unstrapped herself. “ Well, that’s something,”
she said, and pushed off with her feet.

I watched her fly gracefully out of the saloon. Some people
think women look their best in spaceships. All the curves are
high curves, with no gravity straining at pectoral, abdominal,
gluteal and thigh muscles. On the other hand the fallsuit which
is usually worn in space — a one-piece garment caught at wrists
and ankles — is seldom glamorous.

Thinking of fallsuits made me glance beside me. Lorraine
had left her towel and clean suit behind.

I threw back my head and laughed. That was supposed to
be impossible. People who had been cleared just didn’t forget
things. So this towel wasn’t here. I was imagining things.

I unstrapped Lorraine’s things and myself and started after
her.

She was in the so-called bath when I reached the so-called
bathroom. One bathroom was allocated to the six of us.

If you want to make some money and be blessed by thousands
of spaceship travellers, get busy and think up some satisfactory
way of getting washed in free fall. The ordinary toilet functions
aren’t too badly catered for, but when it comes to taking a bath
human integrity so far hasn’t distinguished itself.

You could quite easily be sprayed by water, like a shower,
but when the water bounces off you in all directions, and off
the walls, and back again, how are you going to escape drowning?
Water and air in space are the very devil. Surface tension is

UNIT

21

enough to keep droplets of water together, not enough to keep
big globules in one piece. When you touch water it runs all
over you.

The only way to take a bath is this. You put on an air-mask
and go into a tank full of w'ater, with a complicated water-lock
to enable you to get in and out without taking all the water in
the tank with you.

Lorraine was in the tank. Her discarded clothes hung from
a strap. Apparently she hadn’t remembered leaving her things
with me.

I left them on another strap and was just leaving when I
heard a muffled tapping.

I was puzzled. Why should Lorraine be tapping the inside
of her tank ? Unless she’d taken in with her something hard
with which to do the tapping it must be quite painful banging
the inside of a metal tank with bare knuckles against water
resistance.

The tapping went on, insistent.

I tried the water-lock. Naturally it didn’t move.

I tapped back. There was a pause, then the tapping inside
resumed, quicker and stronger.

Not content with forgetting things, Lorraine seemed to have
locked herself into a water-tank. I grinned again.

Then I saw that the tank was locked on the outside.

These tanks are like ordinary bathroom doors — they have a
catch inside. But there was also a lock, used presumably when
a tank was empty or out of order or being used for something
else. Someone had locked Lorraine in.

I looked in another bathroom. There was a key in the lock
of its bath. I removed it, took it back and tried it on the lock
of Lorraine’s tank. It fitted.

Lorraine came out dressed in an air-mask and grabbed her
towel and fallsuit. “ Be a gentleman, Edgar,” she said. “Retreat.”

“ Why ?” I asked. “ Don’t they remove all your inhibitions
when they clear you ? ”

“ Yes,” she said primly. “ But you still have yours.”

“ I’m not leaving you alone anyway,” I said more soberly.
“ Someone’s trying to kill you. And he might try again.”

Lorraine stared at me for a moment. After that she wasted
no time in getting herself dried and into the fallsuit. Then we
went in search of the rest of the Unit.

23

NEW WORLDS

This was the Unit’s first job.

They very soon reached the conclusion that my guess was
right and that someone had really tried to kill Lorraine.

The tiny facemask can manufacture air for about fifteen
minutes. But for the accident of Lorraine leaving her towel
behind no one would have gone near the bathroom for at least
half an hour. At the end of that time someone would have
asked “ Where’s Lorraine ? ” and after another quarter of an
hour it would have been established that I’d seen her going to
have a bath. We’d go looking for her, find the tank unlocked
by this time, of course, with Lorraine drowned inside it. We’d
have presumed that her mask was faulty.

If Lorraine hadn’t realised almost as soon as she got into the
tank that she’d left her things behind, and tried to come out to
go and get them, she wouldn’t have discovered that she was
locked in until I’d been and gone.

The chances were altogether too much in favour of Lorraine
being drowned for the incident to be anything but a carefully
planned attempt at murder.

There might have been a possibility that someone had been
playing a joke on Lorraine, if we’d known anyone on the ship.
But we didn’t know a soul. There were no children on board
who might have played a foolish trick like this.

Dick left us for a while to get information and a passenger
list from the captain. When he came back the Unit went to work
again.

I wasn’t in this. I sat in the room and listened, but I couldn’t
help them and I didn’t understand much of what was going on.
Someone would begin to say something, then stop. Lorraine
and Dick would speak at once. Brent would begin something,
Helen would take it up, Dick would shake his head. Lorraine
would look up suddenly, lone would interpret the look and for
a moment they’d all be chattering excitedly.

It didn’t look at all impressive at first. Then you realised
that every time anybody stopped speaking, a whole process of
thought had been followed out and discarded.

You see it happening sometimes with people who have quick
minds and know each other very well. Someone begins to ask
something, after a word or two another begins to answer, then
the first speaker interrupts, satisfied.

I once saw a class of bright schoolboys running a competitive
quiz. One question and answer went like this :

“ A man asleep one night dreamed that — ”

UNIT

23

“ The answer is, how could he — ”

“ That’s right.”

The Unit worked like that. They didn’t have telepathy and
they didn’t need it. Language and knowledge of each other’s
processes of thought were enough.

Dick had to do more talking than anybody else, because the
others had much more difficulty in understanding what he was
thinking than he had in understanding them. However, even
Dick generally didn’t have to say very much before the others
grasped what he was driving at.

Having reached the tentative conclusion that the most probable
motive for the attempt to murder Lorraine was that the Traders
did have interests on Perryon and didn’t want the Unit to inves-
tigate there, they turned their attention to the passenger list.
It contained quite a lot of information about the people on
board. Nevertheless, I didn’t think for a moment that the Unit
would be able to establish the identity of the assassin just from
that.

They thought so, however. They came up with three names
and declared confidently that the assassin must be one of these
three. They didn’t give their reasons. Then we went to see
the captain again.

Captain Rawlson was in full charge of his ship, and we
were merely six passengers, theoretically. But the fact that we
were a Unit, with the full backing of the U.A. in anything we
did, and still stronger backing behind that, made him nervous
and ready to fall over himself in an effort to help us.

I was the spokesman, though Dick had told me what to say.

“ If you and two of your officers come with us,” I said, “while
we call on these three people, we’ll be able to find the right one.”

“ How ? ” the captain asked, bewildered.

I couldn’t answer that, so I turned to Dick.

“ Just by interpreting their reaction to seeing us,” Dick said.

“ But . . . what then ? ” asked the captain. He still wanted
to give us all the help possible, but he couldn’t arrest a man
because we thought he looked guilty.

“ I don’t know,” I said, taking over again. “ It will depend
on circumstances. At least after that we’ll know whom to
watch.”

The captain still looked doubtful, but couldn’t very well
refuse. He and two of his officers came with us and we went in
search of the three people on our list.

24

NEW WORLDS

We called on the woman first, a Mrs. Walker. Rhoda Walker
turned out to be an attractive widow of twenty-eight, very quick
and alert and smart and metallic. She reminded me of Helen
before Helen was cleared. Of course Helen herself wouldn’t
know about that.

The moment I saw her I thought we’d come to the right place.
She looked not only the kind of woman who would commit a
murder, but also the kind of person who would think up a scheme
like that to do it.

Lorraine did the talking. “Sorry to trouble you, Mrs. Walker,”
she said pleasantly. “ Someone just tried to kill me, and I
wondered if you could help us to find out who it was.”

“ Kill you ? Here in the ship ? ” the woman exclaimed.

Lorraine nodded. “ Frankly, Mrs. Walker, we think it might
have been you,” she said in the same pleasant tone.

Rhoda Walker looked around the party. “ I begin to under-
stand,” she said softly. “ You’re a Unit, going to Perryon.
Someone doesn’t want you to get there — as a Unit.” '

“ That was the conclusion we reached,” Lorraine agreed.
“ I believe you’re returning to Perryon to marry again, Mrs.
Walker ? ”

For the first time the woman showed surprise. “ Flow do
you know that ? ” she demanded.

“ We’re good at guessing,” said Dick. “ How old are you,
Mrs. Walker ? ”

She looked at the captain, holding himself in the doorway
with me. All the Uniteers had packed themselves into the small
cabin. The three officers and I were looking in from the door-
way.

“ Do I have to answer these questions ? ” Mrs. Walker asked
the captain.

He hesitated. “ Please do, Mrs. Walker,” he said at last.
“ I may tell you — ”

“ No, you may not,” said Dick quickly.

“ All right,” said the woman. She turned her head to look
at Brent hovering behind her. “ But kindly stay over there
where I can see you all.”

“ Excuse me,” said Brent politely, and slipped his hand down
inside her fallsuit. There was a very brief struggle, and Brent
came away holding a tiny gun. Rhoda’s suit had been torn open,
showing a curiously robust brassiere. To wear a bra at all in
space was unnecessary and unusual. However, the reason was
now obvious. The gun had come from a tiny holster ,'etween
her breasts.

UNIT

25

“ Now you will answer questions,” said the captain with some
satisfaction. “ Carrying arms aboard ship is illegal. I can
arrest you here and now.”

“ Go ahead,” said Rhoda. She had already recovered her
poise and was calmly fastening the top of her suit again.

“I’m sure you don’t really mean that, Mrs. Walker,” said the
captain. “ Incarceration aboard a spaceship is most uncom-
fortable.”

Lorraine settled the issue by carrying on as if nothing had
happened. “ Dick asked how old you were, Mrs. Walker,” she
said.

“ Twenty-eight. It’s on the passenger list, if you career to
look.”

“ We have looked. I think you’re about thirty-four.”

Rhoda shrugged but made no other answer.

“ Your son is about fourteen,” Lorraine remarked. “ At
least, he would have been if he’d lived.”

Rhoda jerked convulsively. “ How do you do it ? ” she asked.
She didn’t really care — she asked that question to cover some-
thing else.

“ Did you try to kill Lorraine ? ” Dick asked.

“ No,” said Rhoda.

Dick turned away. “ It’s true,” he said. “ She knows some-
thing, and we’ll be back to find out what. But meantime we
want to find someone else. Let’s go.”

I opened my mouth to suggest that if Rhoda Walker knew
anything we’d better get it from her here and now, for at least
half a dozen good reasons. But I didn’t say anything. Dick
knew what he was doing.

Brent looked at the captain, waying the gun. “ Do I give it
to her or to you ? ” he asked.

“To me,” said the captain, a trifle dazed. “ You can get it
from me at the end of the trip, Mrs. Walker.”

“ Come back some other time and see me socially,” said
Rhoda, as we went out.

“ Don’t worry,” said Dick over his shoulder. “ We will.”

I couldn’t understand it any more than the captain could.
But I had the beginning of an idea.

The ordinary person, guessing, makes use of a lot of things
he doesn’t even know. Some of them are useful and liable to
help him, while others are worse than useless and liable to give
him the wrong answer every time. Take the lucky fellow. He’s

26

NEW WORLDS

weighed the chances unconsciously and always veers toward the
thing which might pay off and away from the thing which is
going to entail more risk than it’s worth. Then take the unlucky
fellow. He always has good reasons for doing the wrong thing.
He can always find ways to lose money. T ell him the right thing
to do, he’ll go away to do it, and later you’ll find that between
leaving you and doing the thing he’s thought of some much
better thing to do and has lost money, crashed his car, offended
a customer, landed in jail or broken a leg.

The unlucky fellow has some sort of command that every-
thing he does must turn out wrong. He tells you so himself.
Everything I do turns out wrong. He says that twenty times a
week. That or something like it.

Now the Uniteers have absolutely no bias any way. Even
when they make blind guesses, the guesses are really blind, not
modified by desire or hope or fear. And when they have reason
to think a thing might be so, they know what the reason is, how
likely it is, and how to check it.

How Lorraine had guessed Rhoda Walker was going back to
Perryon to marry again I didn’t know. Her guess was right,
but probably Lorraine would still have got some of what she
wanted if it had been wrong. Then Dick asked how old she
was — marking time perhaps, but her reaction had told Lorraine
that she was older than she pretended. Meantime Brent had
been hovering about unobtrusively, watching Rhoda closely.
Perhaps she had made a tiny movement toward the gun. It
was even possible that he’d caught the glint of metal as he floated
over her. After that Lorraine had made another good guess,
a little off the target — and instantly realised that it was off the
target, and shot again.

Like fortune-tellers, Lorraine and Dick) hadn’t had to guess
about particular things. They probably couldn’t say whether
Rhoda Walker had been born on Earth or not, for example, but
they didn’t have to. They told her some of what they had
guessed.

And Dick had led us away as soon as he was completely certain
that Rhoda wasn’t the assassin. There was something else we
could get from her, he said. The fact that he hadn’t tried meant
that he didn’t want to get it— not yet.

The second person we called on was a false lead. I won’t go
into details. The Unit questioned him closely and made a lot
of intelligent guesses about him, but he wasn’t the man we were
looking for.

UNIT

27

Jack Kelrnan, the last suspect, was surprised to see us, but
friendly enough. He was a small, restless man, restless enough
not to be able to relax even in free fall.

“ Sure, shoot,” he said. “ I got nothing to hide.”

lone was sniffing. “ Perfume,” she said.

None of the rest of us could smell anything. lone’s sense of
smell had been sharper than that of the rest of us before she’d
been cleared, and it still was.

“ Helen ! ” said Dick sharply.

That was cover. Helen moved, but it was Brent again who
threw himself on Kelrnan.

Again there was a gun. This time it was fired. At one
period it had been pointing at Lorraine, but when it went off,
still in Kelman’s hand, with Brent holding his wrist, it blew the
lower half of Jack Kelrnan away.

The women got outside quickly. Being cleared they probably
couldn’t be sick even at such a sight. Nevertheless, none of
them had any desire to stay and watch.

“ Let’s get back to Rhoda Walker’s cabin,” said Dick.

The captain protested. A man had been killed. There were
things to be done . . .

“ If you don’t want more than one death on your ship,” said
Dick, “ let’s get back to Rhoda Walker’s cabin.”

The captain made no further protest.

Rhoda Walker was floating in the middle of her cabin. She
hadn’t been shot, she’d been strangled. If anything, the sight
of her was less pleasant than Kelrnan had been.

The captain, Dick and I reached quick agreement. The captain
obviously didn’t share my suspicion that Brent could have taken
Kelman’s gun away from him as easily as he had taken Rhoda’s
— without the gun going off. It was easily established that it
had been Kelman’s hands which had choked the life out of Rhoda.
And the captain was ready — in fact eager — to believe that Rhoda
or Kelrnan or both had made the attempt on Lorraine’s life.

Thus the matter was quickly settled, officially.

As Dick said later : “ There wasn’t much we could have
learned from them, Edgar. They were small-time crooks hired
to do a job. Look how easily they panicked. The people who
hired them certainly wouldn’t have allowed them to know much.
It was more important to get them both out of the way.”

“ So you gave Rhoda a chance to go to Kelrnan, warn him,
tell him we suspected her and be murdered for her trouble ? ”

28

NEW WORLDS

I suggested. “ Not to mention giving Kelman a chance to go
for his gun and get himself accidentally shot ? ”

“ If we hadn’t handled it that way,” said Dick simply, “ how
could we have handled it ? ”

I began to see why people distrusted the Units and insisted
on having Unit Fathers in charge.

Ill

Having been told so plainly that someone didn’t want us on
Perryon, we nevertheless reserved judgment and didn’t conclude
that it must be the Traders.

It had seemed quite possible that the people who didn’t want
us there had a stake in the North-South dispute we were sup-
posed to be going there to settle. But when we got there we
found this was a minor affair, one we could easily handle.

The wars in Lilliput arose over the momentous question —
whether to break eggs at the smaller or larger end. Swift meant
to be satirical in choosing this as a cause for war, but satire has
a habit, of being less satirical than the truth.

Perryon’s main point at issue was whether Terran or galactic
history should be taught in schools.

Benoit City was the main town in the north and Sedgeware
the capital in the south. Benoit City Council declared that
since Perryon was a new world the children would be much
better off with an understanding of the current state of the
galaxy than with knowledge of the old, dead, useless lore of
Earth. Sedgeware immediately retaliated with a course in
Terran history from the earliest days to the present, saying that
Earth was the mother world and people without knowledge of
their heritage were primitive savages.

Presently books on Earth were unobtainable in Benoit City
and information about the colonies was difficult to procure in
Sedgeware.

Then the people of chilly Benoit City took to wearing new,
fanciful clothes which had only one thing in common — none of
them resembled anything ever worn on Earth. Since the people
of Earth had at one time or another worn everything which
constituted sensible clothing for the human race, the people of
Benoit City had quite a job to find anything radically original,
and often had to go to enormous extremes, just to be different.
Meantime the people of warm Sedgeware wore nothing which

UNIT

29

wasn’t of precise Terran cut, and while the women got on all
right in summer clothes the men sweltered in double-breasted
suits and felt hats.

In the Assembly the North delegates always voted for com-
plete independence of Earth and the Southerners fought tooth
and nail anything which broke the ties with Earth. Soon it was
impossible to have a joint assembly at all, and two new Senates
sat in Benoit and Sedgeware.

The first acts of violence arose over street names. Benoit
City started it by changing all street names which savoured of
Earth— High Street, Fifth Avenue, Broadway, Oxford Street,
King Street, Regent Street, Willowbank. Sedgeware changed
all its streets to names of Terran towns. Then marauders in
Benoit City defaced the pure-Perryon street names and raiders
in Sedgeware tore down the Earth names.

After that it wasn’t long before any party of Southerners
found in Benoit City were assumed to be there to commit sabo-
tage. Soon after the first fights, the firsts deaths were reported.

When we arrived, the two factions weren’t far short of open
war. And that was all it was about.

In Benoit City on the day we arrived Lorraine and I stood at
the window of the former governor’s residence and watched
people pass outside. We could hardly believe our eyes.

A child of five, sex unknown, went past wearing what looked
like a model spaceship. A girl hobbled past in a dress shaped
like a water-pipe. A man wore a box-shaped garment about his
hips and a shirt in the shape of a sphere. The sphere idea was
quite common. Apparently the perfect sphere was passed as
non-Terran. The next man we saw wore what looked like a
big cannon-ball about his middle and smaller cannon-balls
everywhere else. A girl came along in the first skin-tight outfit
we’d seen, with holes cut for her naked breasts to stick through.
The idea, we guessed, was that this must be true Perryon style
because it certainly wasn’t anything else.

“ Wonder if it’s safe to walk outside looking like we do ? ”
Lorraine murmured. “ Or must I get a square bra and rect-
angular panties ? ”

This wasn’t necessary we found. The split wasn’t because
the North hated Earth and the South loved it. The Northerners
weren’t fighting with Earth, they were fighting with the South
Perryonians over Earth.

3 °

NEW WORLDS

We spent the first week at the residence in Benoit City and
the second week in Sedgeware. We suspected that the Perryon-
ians would be counting almost to the second the time we spent
in the North and in the South, ready to squawk if one was
favoured over the other.

For Perryon was proud of us. We were the planet’s first
Unit. Even in Benoit City it was realised that we weren’t there
to rule Perryon on Earth’s behalf, but to help the world indepen-
dent of Earth. We did a few little jobs in the first few days
that helped a lot — small stuff as far as a Unit was concerned,
but very useful to the local people, and they were grateful.

We managed to settle a labour dispute, for example, simply
by interpreting one side to the other. We showed the engineers
who were going to dam a river exactly where and how to do it,
and solved a troublesome case for the Benoit City police. These
were just spare-time jobs, but they got'a lot of publicity which
didn’t do our status in the community any harm.

So far we didn’t interfere in the North-South arguments. We
wanted to know more before we tackled that problem. Never-
theless, we were actually asked by the two Senates to act as liaison
officers, and performed our first duties in a manner not too
unsatisfactory to either side.

In the course of our local research it was easy to look for
evidences of T rader activity. We found about what we expected.
The Traders dealt with Perryon, obviously — all sorts of goods
which hadn’t paid duty were to be seen both in Benoit City
and in Sedgeware.

But we didn’t find any evidence that Perryon was the Traders,
base.

We knew already that none of the T raders’ ships were on any
official register. People had been bribed to describe them, and
the information thus gained indicated that the Traders’ ships
were small and specially built to be easily hidden. They weren’t
to be found on any world masquerading as ordinary cargo ships.
When not in use they were probably buried in deep holes specially
made for them in deserted spots, holes which would be covered
carefully while the ships were away so that no aerial survey
would reveal anything.

So we knew we weren’t going to see any large, suspicious,
tarpaulin-covered objects in back yards, objects which would
turn out to be unregistered Trader ships. We were looking for
more subtle indications than that.

And we didn’t find any. There was no sign on Perryon of
Trader money, for example.

UNIT

3 1

There’s no point in making a kill unless you can benefit by
it. Criminals through the ages have been notoriously unable to
hang on to their loot until the hue and cry has died down before
emerging as rich and powerful citizens.

We investigated all the people on Perryon who seemed to have
a lot of money. That was easy, for there were about six of them.

Perryon was a poor planet and would probably always be a
poor planet. Her natural resources weren’t high, and the world
had only been colonized because it was so similar to Earth. It
was a comfortable world to live on, probably the most comfortable
after Earth of all the worlds so far settled. But if Perryon didn’t
have the discomforts of Fryon and Gersten and Parioner, it
didn’t have their rewards either.

32

NEW WORLDS

A rich man stood out on Perryon like a sore thumb. All the
men we investigated, except one, had brought their money to
Perryon and how they had made it could be easily checked.
The one exception was a financial genius who was making money
like Henry Ford — only since he was operating on Perryon instead
of Earth, cars weren’t enough and he had to run businesses in
electronics, engineering, publishing, textiles, mining, banking
and a dozen other things. We checked Robert G. Underwood
very thoroughly without finding any hint that his coffers might
be swelled by Trader profits.

Toward the end of the second week, Dick and I were dis-
cussing things at the residency in Sedgeware. Outside on the
lawn Brent, lone and Helen were sunning themselves. Lorraine
was in town conferring with the police chief. We worked very
closely with the police of both Benoit City and Sedgeware.

Since their clearing and training lone and Helen had become
almost dumb. And Brent had been dumb anyway. Dick and
Lorraine did most of the Unit’s talking between them, though
occasionally when some Unit representative had to be sent some-
where merely to make an appearance and pick up facts Helen
or lone was sent.

“ You’re sure there’s no danger ? ” I asked, nodding at the
three on the lawn. Anyone who wanted to take a shot at them
could do so without hindrance. We had no guards in attendance.

“ Oh yes,” said Dick confidently. “ Making an attempt on
Lorraine’s life in the ship, something that might have passed
off as an accident, was one thing. Jack Kelman was just a thug
hired to do a job, Rlioda Walker an assistant in case he needed
one. But trying anything here would merely prove that there
was something here for a Unit to find, and the U.A. would
probably send out about six Units to make sure it was found.”

“ It’s all very well for you,” I commented. “ It isn’t your
responsibility to look after the safety of the Unit — it’s mine.”

“ Believe me,” said Dick, “ if something happened to a
member of this Unit — any member — you wouldn’t care half as
much about it as we would.”

“ I don’t quite get that,” I said. “ Suppose you lost lone,
say. The four of you who were left would still have plenty of
brains and drive and personality and brawn, wouldn’t you ?
Would it make all that difference ? Surely the Unit would
function much as before ? ”

UNIT

33

Dick shook his head very decidedly. “ Absolutely not,” he
said. “ We’re trained so that we each cover so much. We
could have been trained so that the four of us without lone could
do a decent job . . . but we weren’t. When anything happens
to any one of us, you’re supposed to take his place — but frankly,
Edgar, you’d be no good at all.”

“ Seems to me,” I remarked, “ that it’s a queer way to build
up a working force — useless if one member is missing.”

Dick grinned. “ What a wonderful argument that is. You
could make a car with only three wheels. Does that mean that
if you make a car with four, you should make it so that it can run
quite well on three ? Should you construct your car so that it
will run if necessary without a carburettor, or without the petrol
pump, or the oil pump ? ”

“ All right, you win,” I grunted.

“ That analogy isn’t too bad. The five of us are the engine,
the transmission, the body, the wheels and the controls. Without
any one of us, what good is the car ? ”

The phone rang. Strictly I should have answered, but Dick
was nearest. He picked it up.

People who are cleared don’t lose their emotions. They are
said to feel all the more pleasant emotions much more clearly
and strongly than ordinary people, and though the less pleasant
emotions like fear and anger and desperation don’t necessarily
affect them the way they do us, they’re still there.

But cleared people don’t have to show these emotions. If
they’re with others who are showing theirs, they do, usually,
just to be sociable. ' They seldom make demonstrations which
are artificial as far as they’re concerned.

Dick was so calm I thought this was just a routine call. So
it was a shock when he put the phone down and said :

“ Someone just shot six bullets into Lorraine. She won’t
live. Let’s get down to the hospital, shall we ? ”

It took a while before even the considerable authority we
could wield got us in to see Lorraine. They’d been operating
when we arrived. There was a faint chance to save her life,
apparently, but so faint that it was mentioned only for the sake
of accuracy.

“ Don’t you understand, idiot,” Dick said heatedly to the
head surgeon, for once letting his exasperation with ordinary
uncleared people show, “ that that’s exactly why we’ve got to
see her right away ? She’s a member of a Unit. With the rest

34

NEW WORLDS

of us helping her, she’ll pull through if there’s the ghost of a
chance. But if—”

The head surgeon walked away.

Cleared or not, Dick was raging. It was as if someone was
insisting on amputating his right leg and he knew the leg didn’t
have to be amputated.

“ Cool down,” I said. “ We’ve got to do this their way.”

“ While Lorraine dies ! ” Dick exclaimed.

On Earth the Units are commoner and better understood.
People know that if a Uniteer has a baby, for example, the other
members of the Unit are always with her. The husband, who-
ever he is, stays outside as usual, but the four other members of
her Unit are there beside her, helping her. Not that they need
to be there for a confinement.

They do need to be there when it’s something really serious.

You see, in one way cleared people aren’t as sensible as the
rest of us. If they’re in supreme danger, if they’re badly injured,
they refuse to give up. They won’t lapse into unconsciousness
and cease to take any responsibility for what happens to them.
They go on fighting until at last they die.

That’s if they’re on their own — or surrounded by ordinary
people, which comes to the same thing as far as a cleared person
is concerned.

If the Unit is there, they trust it completely, as usual. The
Unit tells them to sleep, or concentrate on something, or block
off something, or go into deep trance for days at a time if necessary
and they do exactly as they’re told.

Uniteers aren’t medically qualified, but they do know far
more about their own bodies and about some aspects of healing
than doctors do.

I sent lone to find out what had happened, Brent to check
on conditions at the hospital to make sure that whoever had
shot Lorraine didn’t have a chance to make absolutely sure,
Helen to see the police chief, and Dick to find out from some
responsible doctor exactly what Lorraine’s injuries were. I gave
them four minutes.

I myself went to see the medical supervisor. He’d be up-to-
date in his information and would know that Uniteers shared
everything — even operations.

That was what I hoped. What I found was an old man who
tried to argue with me.

“ I know it’s often done,” he agreed, “ but surely it’s merely
a sort of Unit privilege. Now in this case I understand the

UNIT

35

woman has two bullets through the right lung and one in the
stomach. It’s purely a surgical — ”

“ Doctor Green,” I said savagely, “ if you delay us ten seconds
more, I’ll have you broken and thrown into the street.”

The doctor drew himself erect. “ Intimidation won’t get you
anywhere, young man,” he snapped. “ I’m in charge here, and
I haven’t refused your request, merely — ”

“ Merely delayed us so that when we get to Lorraine it may
be too late. Dr. Green, if Lorraine dies you may be charged with
murder.”

That got through and frightened him. It wasn’t an idle
threat either, and perhaps he could see that. If Lorraine died
and later investigation showed that the assistance of her Unit
might have saved her life, Green would be hounded by the U.A.

Green and I arrived back at the operating theatre just as Dick,
Brent and Helen got back from their errands. We had to wait
ten seconds for lone.

We went in. We were lucky, we were able to stop the heavy
sedation they were putting Lorraine under. Trouble with medi-
cine is, it’s ninety-five per cent generalization. Since Lorraine
had been shot six times, with three wounds which could be
classed as fatal, they were naturally treating her for shock as
well.

Which was wrong, for Lorraine wasn’t, couldn’t be, suffering
from shock.

When she first opened her eyes, we were all there. She was
conscious only for a few seconds, but even that dumbfounded
the doctors. She shouldn’t have regained consciousness at all.

They all spoke to her, rapidly, quietly. Dick told her briefly
and with bluntness which shocked the doctors exactly what her
injuries were and how serious they were. He told her what to
do. Helen, who as a woman could tell her more than Dick
could, amplified his recommendations. lone added a word or
two. Brent merely said her name, but I gathered it carried a
promise that she need devote no attention to self-defence — he
was taking that over.

In less than half a minute it was over. The Unit could cover
a lot of ground in a very short time.

When she went under again Dick breathed a sigh of relief.
“ She’s okay,” he said. “ She’ll sleep for about six hours.
We’ll have to be back here then.” He looked at the doctors

36 NEW WORLDS

round us. “ And before you do a thing to her, check with us,
understand ? ”

The chief surgeon still hadn’t recovered from the shock of
seeing Lorraine open her eyes. “ I don’t understand this . .
he began.

“ That’s what I was telling you,” said Dick. “ You don’t
understand it at all. Get this for a start. Lorraine’s cleared.
That means she has much more control of her so-called autono-
mous nerve centre than you’ve ever known anyone to have.
When she suffers an injury the brain doesn’t cut out just to save
itself, it wants to know if there’s anything it can do and won’t
go out of phase until it’s satisfied. That’s why we had to be
here. We told her she’d be all right and that she could sleep
for six hours with everything under control,”

“ But you don’t know — ”

Dick sighed. “ I know exactly what her injuries are and
exactly how she can help them to heal. Doctor, if Lorraine felt
like it she could step up her thyroid activity or cut it down.
She could stimulate or diminish her heartbeat. She has some
control over all the endocrine glands and can exert a small
influence over the behaviour of most groups of cells she decides
to concentrate on. If you looked at her wounds now you’d be
astonished to find how clean they are already.

The surgeon looked at me. I nodded. I’d seen one or two
demonstrations at the U.A. depot.

“ I’ll believe you,” said the surgeon. Obviously it was an
effort.

We held a discussion with the doctors about Lorraine’s treat-
ment and then went out — except Brent. He had taken charge
of Lorraine. He had promised her that it was safe to sleep, and
he was going to keep his promise.

The doctors still believed Lorraine was going to die, obviously.
That didn’t worry us.

We compared notes. Apparently Lorraine had just left the
police chief and was walking in the street when a man in a grey
suit fired six shots into her from twenty yards’ range, jumped
into a car and was driven off. The car had already been found
abandoned. It had been stolen anyway.

There had been no pursuit because there weren’t many cars
in Sedgeware and the only one in the street at the time had bee»
going the other way. The only description we could get of the
assassin was that he was tall and wore a grey suit. There had

UNIT

37

been someone in the car, but there was no description of him at
all.

I couldn’t help remarking : “ You’d just been proving this

wouldn’t happen, Dick.”

“ I know,” said Dick. “ This seems crazy. It’s been Lorraine
both times. Could someone be trying to kill Lorraine, indepen-
dent of the Unit ? ”

My thoughts somersaulted. Lorraine, though she no longer
knew it, was A.D.’s daughter. And A.D. was mixed up in all
sorts of things and might have all sorts of enemies.

“ Could be,” I said. “ I’ll tell you what I know later.”

“ Tell me what you know now,” said Dick, though we were
still standing in the corridor outside the operating theatre.

I told him.

“ We’ll check on that,” said Dick. “ But it doesn’t sound
likely.”

“ You thought it wasn’t likely that Lorraine would be shot.”

Dick nodded. One thing about Uniteers — you can’t needle
them. Dick had made a mistake, and it didn’t bother him. He
didn’t blame himself for not having foreseen the attempt on
Lorraine’s life. .

We left the hospital. Nothing was said about taking extra
care now, but I noticed lone wasn’t even listening to what Dick
and I were saying. She was looking about her like a lynx. With
Brent guarding Lorraine, she had taken over the job of protecting
us.

“ Next thing,” said Dick. “ Could it have been meant to
happen just like this ? Lorraine seriously hurt, but not dead ?
After all, an old explosive gun was used. If it had been a new
gun, it wouldn’t have been worth taking what was left to the
hospital.”

Unexpectedly it was Helen who answered that. “ One in the
shoulder, two in the legs, two through a lung and one in the
stomach,” she said. “ The best marksman in the galaxy couldn’t
do that and expect the victim to live afterwards.”

That disposed of that.

When Lorraine wasn’t around, Helen talked more. She
brought up the next point.

“ Could this be a Benoit City stratagem to turn us against
Sedgeware ? ” she asked.

Dick considered it. “ No,” he said. “ Because obviously it
won’t.”

38

NEW WORLDS

We got back to the house. Already there was a police guard
there. Tyburn, the Sedgeware police chief, was taking no more
chances.

I saw right away when the three Uniteers who remained tried
to get down to business that what Dick had said about all five
being essential was all too true. There was no Unit any more —
just four people, including me. Four people who could make
mistakes like any other four people.

“ But we’ll get a session with Lorraine tomorrow,” said Dick.

“ No you won’t,” I retorted.

Dick looked at me in surprise. “ The fact that she’s in hospital
won’t stop us,” he said. “ We can sit round her bed and — ”

“ So far,” I said grimly, “ I’ve only got your word for it that
Lorraine will live. And we’re not going to take any chances
with her.”

Dick nodded reluctantly. “ Anyway she won’t take sedation
so she’ll have a lot of pain for a day or two,” he said. “ Might
not be at her best. We’ll wait a couple of days.”

“ We’ll wait more than that,” I said. “ Officially I’m in
charge of this Unit, remember ? ”

It was decided that meantime the Unit should function as
fact-finding individuals. We all carried guns and kept our eyes
open.

The difference between the kind of investigation you read of
in fiction and the one we were engaged in was that in fiction
the people behind the spy ring or crime cartel or whatever it is
introduce themselves to the investigators in the first few hours
— though not, of course, as the leaders of the spy ring or crime
cartel. The fictional detective merely has to sift through the
people he knows, remembering that the more harmless his sus-
pect, the more likely he is to be the villain of the piece.

Now with us the position was exactly the opposite. Assuming
our opponents had the slightest knowledge of the capabilities of
a Unit, and at least average intelligence, we knew they’d have
stayed out of our way. None of the people we’d met in Benoit
City or Sedgeware could possibly be involved with our enemies.

Just as the Unit had identified Jack Kelman and Rhoda
Walker they could identify people involved in the other attempt
to kill Lorraine. The fact that we hadn’t done so meant that
we hadn’t met any of them.

And we weren’t going to, either. Detectives may be under-
rated. Few people underrate Units any more.

UNIT

39

During the next few days we learned almost all there was to
be known about Perryon. We visited the other cities. Nineteen
towns, in addition to Benoit City and Sedgeware, had more than
twenty thousand inhabitants. One of us visited each of them.

And Helen, after one such visit, came up with what might be
the answer to the North-South problem.

Benoit City and Sedgeware were the clear leaders of the two
sections of Perryon, and the people of these two cities were also
the leaders of the North-South squabble. But Twendon, a
hundred miles to the north of Sedgeware, and Foresthill, two
hundred miles south of Benoit City, were only a little behind
them in economic and political importance. And neither Twen-
don nor Foresthill had ever taken much part in the dispute.
Being in the south of the northern hemisphere and in the north
of the southern section, they could understand both points of
view, steered a middle course, and didn’t think it mattered much
anyway.

Now 1 the Unit, once it was functioning again, could quite
easily sway the balance of power and make Twendon the capital
of the South and Foresthill the capital of the North. The
influence and importance of Benoit City and Sedgeware would
wane, and so would the importance of the issues they stood for.

We needn’t tell anyone, even the people of Twendon and
Foresthill, what we were doing.

None of us saw any sign that Perryon was the Traders’ base,
and none of our efforts to find out who had shot Lorraine bore
any fruit.

Lorraine was going to be all right, eventually. She had been
so seriously injured that there was no question of her leaving
hospital for some weeks, and even Dick didn’t insist on a Unit
session in the hospital for four or five days.

But at last we’d done all we could do without some guidance
from the Unit as a whole, and since Lorraine herself insisted
that she could take part in a brief Unit session we all went to
the hospital and got busy.

I wasn’t present this time. I was fully occupied keeping
doctors and nurses out of the way. Understandably, they were
all against this. I had some sympathy with their point of view.
Lorraine was still in anything but good shape, and though she
was by now out of danger, her body was fully occupied with
healing without having to cope with a strenuous Unit session
as well.

4 °

NEW WORLDS

And they are strenuous. The man who works with his brain
while his body does nothing can be fully as tired at the end of
a day’s work as a labourer. Fit Uniteers can work together all
day — but a fit Uniteer could also walk upstairs, and it would be
some time before Lorraine could do that.

I had made Dick promise to go easy on Lorraine. He kept
his promise, after a fashion. They were with her for only half
an hour. But I saw her afterwards, and she was dead beat.

“ No more for another week at least, Lorraine,” I promised
her.

She managed a faint smile. “ It took more out of me than
I thought,” she admitted. “ Another thing, Edgar — don’t trust
our conclusions too much. Dick’s satisfied, but I know I wasn’t
playing my full part.”

Dick, when we got back to the residency, was jubilant. “Even
at half strength the Unit can get somewhere,” he said. “ Edgar,
you’ll have to send a new report back to U.A. on Earth. We’ve
been barking up the wrong tree.”

I waited.

“ Someone hired Jack Kelman to kill Lorraine,” said Dick.
“ The Traders, we thought— and we were right. Someone hired
someone else to kill her here in Sedgeware. The Traders again,
we thought — and again we were right.

“ I told you before Lorraine was shot why I thought no
further attempt would be made on us. Because that would
make it* clear that Perryon had something to hide, and in a few
weeks, even if they killed the lot of us, there would be half a
dozen Units out from Earth to investigate the whole thing —
and they’d get results.

“ Well, somebody did shoot Lorraine. So the first thing we
considered today was how that changed the situation. The
obvious answer was that all the Traders wanted was time. They
wanted time to pull something off, or make their escape, or get
themselves properly hidden, before a properly functioning Unit
got busy on Perryon. They didn’t care what happened in two
months, they just didn’t want the Unit checking on them now."

“ That makes sense,” I said with some interest. “ So we’ve
got to get busy now and — ”

Dick was shaking his head. “ We threw that out,” he said.
“ Four people hired to kill Lorraine. Hired, remember. We
don’t know that, but it’s a safe guess. And hired by the Traders.
That’s another safe guess. What does that add up to ? ”

UNIT

4 1

I wasn’t entering into competition with a Unit. “You tell
me,” I suggested.

“ That wherever the Traders’ base is, it isn’t here,” said Dick.

The way I’ve told this, maybe that’s been obvious all along.
I don’t know. But it hit me like the six shells which had ploughed
their way through Lorraine.

All really brilliant stratagems are simple. You conceal the
essential thing so that your antagonists question everything else,
but never think about that. You strew the field with difficulties
which they’ll solve, while the simple, ingenuous flaw is there in
full view all the time. Like Poe’s purloined letter.

The Units on Parionar would also be looking for Trader
activities. But on Parionar no Uniteer would be assassinated.

The Traders had happened to pick on Perryon, and us. They’d
had the sense not to try anything complicated or too obvious.
We wouldn’t bite if it was too obvious.

And the really clever thing about it was that the conclusions
which were reached wouldn’t be reached by a Unit but by the
remaining members of a Unit. Naturally we’d report that •
Perryon was almost certainly the Traders’ base, at any rate a
spot to be investigated soon and thoroughly. Meantime the
Traders, wherever they really were, would be lying low — and
not giving any Unit in their vicinity anything to work on.

“ The only thing is,” I said, “ that this is completely negative.
It gives us nothing positive to report.”

“ We can make a guess,” said Dick. “ At one time both Jack
Kelman and Rhoda Walker were on Fryon. Now the Traders
must have contacted them sometime. And they wouldn’t do it
on Earth if they could help it. Fryon is the only world other than
Earth which both Kelman and Walker visited. Rhoda Walker
had been on Perryon, Kelman never. Fryon may not be the
Traders’ base, of course — but it’s very probably where the
contact was made.”

I remembered scanning the information on the Violin Song’s
passenger list about Kelman and Rhoda Walker. “ But they
were on Fryon at different times,” I objected. “ And it was
months ago.”

Dick nodded. “ I suspect they were recruited on Fryon, but
not for any definite job. Just as people the Traders could call
on. It was much later they got their instructions.”

I wasn’t convinced about Fryon, but I didn’t have to be. If
the Unit said it was so, it was my job to report it.

42

NEW WORLDS

IV

One of the guards came in with a wire. He shouldn’t have
left his post to deliver it, but that’s typical of frontier worlds.
It’s only in highly organised communities that people pay rigid
attention to detail.

The wire was from U.A. on Earth — in code, of course, but
I didn’t need any printed key to decipher it.

The name and address read : Edgar Williamson, Unit Father,
Perryon. Just that. And if either my name or designation had
been left out I’d still have got it. At such times I felt I was
somebody.

“ From U.A.,” I said. “ ‘ Reason here to suspect Perryon.
What progress ? ’ ” I looked at it a shade bitterly. “ That’s
like U.A. They know we’ve got a member badly injured, and
they still expect progress.”

I took a sheet of paper and wrote. I handed the result to Dick.

My message read : Perryon is not Traders’ base. Williamson.

Dick was frowning.

“ Something wrong with that ? ” I asked.

“ You can’t send this,” he said. “ Remember how they’ll
treat anything we send them. They’ll take it as fact and act on
it. It’s only our guess that the Traders had Lorraine attacked
as a red herring.”

“ But Units always work on guesses like that.”

“ Yes, if they’re sure enough. Lorraine wasn’t more than
fifty per cent effective when we decided that. We could be
wrong.”

I hesitated. My impulse was still to send the first message.
It appealed to my sense of the dramatic to send a terse, un-
equivocal reply like that.

Dick, however, was the real boss of the Unit, not me. If he
wouldn’t take the responsibility for sending that message, the
Unit wouldn’t take it, and I had no right to send it.

“ All right,” I said reluctantly. “ How about this ? ”

-My substitute message consisted of one word : Pending.

Dick nodded. “ Perfect,” he said with a grin.

Units aren’t sent out for unrelated information, to report back
to U.A. At least, if they are, they’re told exactly what infor-
mation is needed. In our case it was whether Perryon was the
actual home of the Traders. It wasn’t our job to send back
information at random and let U.A. draw the conclusions — we
were there to draw the conclusions as well as collect the infor-
mation.

UNIT

43

Since we could do no more on the question of the Traders
meantime, we devoted our attention to that other job — settling
Perryon’s North-South altercation.

Dick consulted by a manufacturing firm in Sedgeware, fixed
things so that a big contract went to Twendon. He went to
Twendon to fix up the details. He gave good reasons for his
recommendation, without admitting either in Sedgeware or in
Twendon that the real reason was that by this much Twendon
was elevated in industrial importance and Sedgeware diminished.

lone, on a visit to the North— we were staying in Sedgeware
while Lorraine was in hospital there — went to Foresthill instead
of Benoit City. She spent some time there, for no obvious
reason. We knew that every move by every one of us was
closely examined for special significance, and we knew that
people would be wondering what lone’s visit to Foresthill por-
tended. At least some people would guess that Foresthill was
soon to assume a special importance.

Helen opened a new library at Twendon. Her speech,
without being blatant, hinted that Twendon was the real cultural
centre of the South.

We began to be a trifle unpopular in Sedgeware. We could
no longer hide the fact that ,we didn’t regard Sedgeware as the
proper capital for the South.

We replied apologetically that it couldn’t be helped — Sedge-
ware was already overdeveloped and Twendon was the coming
power in the region.

Some people thought this over, and knowing we must be right,
withdrew capital from Sedgeware and invested it in Twendon.
Young men and women from the smaller towns, looking for a
job, no longer went to Sedgeware but to Twendon instead.

Helen and lone began to appear in clothes which were any-
thing but normal Earth wear. They were smart, simple, mostly
in bright towelling, easy to change and wash. They were exactly
right for Sedgeware’s warm, humid climate, and it might have
been an accident that they were in no way like the fashions of
Earth. Soon the women of Sedgeware were copying them.

Dick and Brent and I went around in shorts. Gradually the
fanatically Terran appearance of everybody and everything in
Sedgeware began to change.

In less than a week we had given the Sedgeware to Twendon
change-over such a push that only we ourselves could have
stopped it. It would be some months before Twendon was the
acknowledged leader in the South, acknowledged even by Sedge-
ware, but the change could no longer be prevented.

44

NEW WORLDS

We completed our preliminary campaign by moving from
Sedgeware to Twendon ourselves as soon as Lorraine could be
moved. Though it wasn’t actually stated, we gave the impression
that we believed Lorraine would get much better treatment
there. It was true, anyway. Twendon realised that we were
putting it on the map, and was duly grateful.

At long range we had been taking steps to do the same thing
with Benoit City and Foresthill. We had to be more subtle
in this case. The second time you try a thing it isn’t so easy.

We had a piece of good luck. Perryon needed a new space-
port. It was to be built with funds from Earth, not local funds.
The merchants of Earth were always prepared to finance such
schemes because, despite the local tariffs, there was still a huge
volume of trade between Earth and all the planets, and even
poor Perryon was worth a major spaceport.

We got in touch with U.A. on Earth and had the site of the
proposed spaceport changed from Benoit City to Foresthill.

It wouldn’t be built for some time yet, but everybody knew
that it was being built at Foresthill instead of Benoit City —
and nobody knew that we’d made the change.

Gradually Foresthill began to grow in power, like Twendon.
And already we could see some of the results of our labours.
Sedgeware and Benoit City still fought, were still deadly rivals,
but it didn’t matter so much. Soon it wouldn’t matter at all.

A long radio message arrived from U.A., Earth. It was
addressed to the Unit Fathers on Gersten, Camisac, Fryon,
Parionar, Maverick, Perryon — forty-seven in all, and it read :

Trader activity must be stopped. Three fleets are cruising
in your areas and a direct call from any one of you will bring
one of them to you within twelve hours. We know the Traders
are based on one of your worlds. Surely it is not beyond the
capabilities of the Unit on the right world to establish the
presence of the Traders ?

Please send out, each of you, on the open wave, your estima-
tion of the probability that your world is the Trader base.
Impossibility , one. Complete certainty, ten. Send nothing
but this figure unless you have reason to believe that the base
may be on some particular world not your own. Send this
in code.

We repeat — we find this continued silence from forty-
seven Units almost incredible. The Traders cannot possibly
be so well hidden that no Unit can discover them — unless

UNIT

45

they have developed a different form of interstellar travel.

If any of you has heard any hint that this may be so, report

it immediately.

“ Yes, it is odd at that,” Dick murmured, as he read the
message. “ How is it that the Traders haven’t been discovered
—by forty-seven Units ? ”

He looked up at me. “ Lorraine’s out of all danger now,
Edgar. We’ve got to have a real high-power session.”

I nodded. The U.A., like many another semi-military
authority, was accepting no excuses. We had a complete Unit
on Perryon, and the services of a complete Unit were expected
of us — -even if one of us was in hospital.

We went to the hospital. Lorraine’s bed was moved to a
small private ward and the door locked.

“ You look healthy enough now, Lorraine,” I said.

“ Yes, I’ve put on fourteen pounds — isn’t it awful ? ” she
exclaimed. Even cleared, a woman is still a woman.

“ You could stand it,” I grinned.

“ No— three or four, maybe, but not fourteen. Let’s get
started. If I can loose a few pounds in nervous energy, so much
the better.”

It was like the last session I’d seen, and I understood no more
of what was going on. But thought I hadn’t seen the Unit at
work the last time, just after Lorraine had been shot, I could
see that this was very difficult. Lorraine lay back in bed, relaxed,
yet even I could feel the vitality of her contribution.

It’s always a guess who supplies what in a Unit. Even the
Uniteers themselves don’t know. As I watched this session I
got the idea that Lorraine was the real force behind this Unit.
The heart, if you like. Dick was the brain, undoubtedly, and
as such was very important. However, the brain in a human
being is not the most vital thing. The heart controls the brain,
not the other way round. The brain is tired when the heart
makes it, alert when the heart allows it to be. Death almost
always comes down in the last resort to heart failure.

Any time the Unit seemed to be stopped, it was Lorraine who
started things going again. Brent, Helen and lone introduced
things, but they had to be taken up by Dick or Lorraine before
they came to anything. Dick’s suggestions and conclusions were
never summarily thrown out except by Lorraine.

Seeing Lorraine’s importance to the Unit, I wasn’t surprised
when I realised that the first thing they had done this time was
throw out all the conclusions they’d reached the last time.

4 6

NEW WORLDS

Presently I saw that they were really on to something, though
I had no idea what it was. Soon after this I gathered that they
were looking for something, trying to locate something or other
not by looking for it, but by probabilities — the way they had
drawn up a list of three possible assassins in the ship from the
passenger list.

I wondered if they thought they could determine the T raders’
base by inspired guesswork. It seemed unlikely. If that had
been possible, one of the other forty-six Units would have done
it long since.

Yet I knew Units, like individuals, differed in their capabilities.
And I thought mine was a particularly good Unit. I knew, of
course, that most Unit Fathers thought that — just as most
parents thought their child the most wonderful in the world.

Suddenly the session was suspended — suspended, not stopped.
They were all looking at me, except Lorraine, who had closed
her eyes, suddenly looking tired again.

“ Edgar,” said Dick. “ Go and find out who the first
man was who opened this North-South split. Who actually
started it. The first speech in the Assembly, the first article in
a paper, whatever it was. Go back as far as you can. Never
mind the later people, the people who took it up. Get two
names — someone in Benoit City and someone in Sedgeware.”

I got up. “ Do I have to keep my interest secret ? ” I asked.

“ No — we’ll be ready to follow it up as soon as you’ve got it.
Try the newspapers, the Assembly records before the split, the
police. You’ll probably have to go to Benoit City. Come back
when you’ve got two names.”

I didn’t ask for any more information. I left them — reflecting
wryly that this showed exactly how important Unit Fathers
were. When his Unit was in full cry it ordered him about like
an errand-boy, and he did as he was told.

I went to the Twendon Times office and asked to see the
librarian. It wasn’t the librarian they took me to see but the
chief editor. If I was only an errand-boy to my Unit, I was a
very important person to everybody else.

“ I only want to have a look at your flies,” I protested. “ I
needn’t take up your time, Mr. Carse.”

“ I know all that’s in the files,” the lean, hungry-looking man
behind the desk informed me. “ Is there a story in this, Mr.
Williamson ”

“ There will be.”

“ What do you want to know , Shoot.”

UNIT

47

“ Who started the trouble between Benoit City and Sedge-
ware ? ” I asked abruptly.

He couldn’t give me a straight, immediate answer. He knew
everything the newspaper had reported, as he claimed, but I
had to keep directing him. He suggested a lot of things, but
there was always something earlier.

At last he said doubtfully : “ Well, I guess the first thing of
all was an article that came in . . . we didn’t run it, but all the
Sedgeware newspapers did. Only thing is, you wouldn’t know
that was the beginning until afterwards— when you knew every-
thing, I mean.”

“ That’s what I want,” I said confidently. “ What was in
the article, and who wrote it ? ”

Dick had asked for two names. I had one of them, and it had
taken me less than half an hour to get it. The other wasn’t
going to be so easy to get.

I flew to Benoit City. It took fifty-five minutes.

Benoit City had never been as friendly toward us as Sedge-
ware. That was natural, for Benoit City was never as friendly
toward anybody as Sedgeware was.

North and South are pretty much the same anywhere. The
North is business-like, in a hurry, brash, confident, hard, cynical,
with the heart of gold well concealed by the pocketbook. The
South is hospitable, friendly, easy-going, lazy, romantic, tradition
loving, happy, optimistic.

Again I went to the local newspaper. Again I was shown into
the presence of the chief, only this time he was called the manag-
ing editor. His name was Morrissey.

Morrissey heard what I had to say, then said immediately :
“ What you’re looking for is something a visiting actress said.
It was ...”

He told me what it was, and he was right. That had set
things moving so that in Benoit City a short time later the council
had voted against the teaching of Earth in schools.

But I was at a loss. The actress had been on a tour of the
galaxy and had probably forgotten Perryon by this time. She
wasn’t in this, I was certain.

“ Who spoke to her,” I asked, “ before she said that ? Who
in this city, I mean ? ”

“ Just one of my reporters. Jenson. I’ll get him for you.”

“ No,” I said quickly. “ Don’t say anything to him.”

NEW WORLDS

“ If there’s a story,” said the editor bluntly, “ is it mine ? ”

“ It’s yours,” I said. “ But you’ll have to share it with Carse
of the Twendon Tunes.”

“ That’s all right,” he said. “ They don’t circulate here.”

I left him and flew back to Twendon.

I’d been away from the ward where the Unit was deliberating
for three hours. But they were still at it when I got back. I
cast an anxious glance at Lorraine.

She grinned weakly. “ I think I’ve lost my fourteen pounds,”
she said. “ But we’re through now. Go away, all of you, and
let me sleep.”

Dick, Helen, lone, Brent and I filed out.

“ Before we do anything else,” I said, “ that reply has to go
to the U.A. Do you realise we got the radiogram four hours
ago ? ”

“ Is that all ? ” said Dick. “ Seems like years.” He was
tired too. “ Send Nine. And put out a direct call for a fleet.”

I gaped at him.

“ I’d like to make it Ten” Dick said, “ but we’re not quite
certain enough.”

I got the two calls away without delay. It’s no use being
impatient with a Unit. They won’t tell you anything until
they’re good and ready.

“ Now we have twelve hours,” said Dick, “ to do a lot of
work.”

“ Seven,” I said. “ Twelve hours was maximum. The fleet
will be here in seven hours.”

Dick groaned. “ And we can’t take Lorraine with us,” he
said. “ Oh, well. What was that first name ? ”

“ Look,” I said, “ I have to know something. You don’t
need to tell me the whole story, but I‘ve got to know what we’re
trying to do.”

“ Instead of trying to keep us away,” said Dick, “ the Traders
wanted us here. They even started the domestic squabble here
to make sure a Unit was sent out. We were supposed to be
sent here, lose Lorraine on the way, or here, it didn’t matter,
decide this wasn’t the Trader base, decide Fryon was, and give
that to U.A. as our conclusion.”

“You mean the Traders thought they could outsmart a Unit ?”
I exclaimed.

“ A Unit minus one,” Dick reminded me. “ But even when
they knew Lorraine wasn’t dead. I don’t think they were worried.
Which means they were very confident.”

UNIT

49

“ Which means they were crazy ! ” I exclaimed.

Dick shook his head. “ Which means they had a Unit of
their own,” he said.

I didn’t say it was impossible. I didn’t say anything.

We started out to look for George Zamorey, who was .the man
who had written the article which sparked off the Sedgeware
attitude.

He was a young, nice-looking fellow. When he saw us he
looked puzzled, but not puzzled enough.

“ So you’re the one,” said Dick. “ I thought we’d have to
go further, find who told you to say that.”

“ I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Zamorey.

“ Oh yes, you do. Have you by any chance got four friends ?”

He was watching Zamorey very closely. Zamorey’s reaction
couldn’t have been right, however. Dick was disappointed, and
made no effort to hide it.

“ What do you know, Zamorey ? ” he demanded.

“ I don’t know what you — ”

“ We haven’t time,” said Dick impatiently. “ Brent, you’ll
have to persuade him.”

I never liked strong-arm methods, and if I’d known more of
what was going on I’d have stopped Brent. I wish I had any-
way. Zamorey must have had a poison sac in his mouth. After
five minutes of Brent’s treatment Zamorey went limp and we
found he was dead.

“ One lead gone,” said Dick. “ We’ll have to be more care-
ful with the other one.”

We flew to Benoit City, all of us. I went straight to Morrissey
and had him send for Jenson.

He was almost too quick for us. He came all right, but
almost before he’d opened the door, certainly before he’d entered
the room, he’d seen us, slammed the door and was running along
the corridor.

We chased him. Dick and I were useless, and Brent, though
powerful, was slow. It was lone who tore after Jenson like a
greyhound. Brent was next, then Helen, then Dick, with me
last.

Nevertheless I saw the capture. lone sent herself flying at
Jenson’s legs and he came down. Jenson might have handled
lone, but he certainly couldn’t handle Brent, who was on him
in an instant.

5 <>

NEW WORLDS

When I came up panting, Jenson was being held firmly by
Brent and Dick was asking : “ Who are your four friends,
Jenson ? ”

To my amazement Jenson made no further resistance. He
surrendered immediately and told us all we wanted to know.

Dick didn’t find it strange. He said later that Jenson, being
a sort of Uniteer himself, knew better than any ordinary person
what he was up against and didn’t waste time by pretending not
to know what we were talking about. It still seemed incredible
to me that Jenson cracked right away and told us everything.

It was much later that Lorraine, who always liked me, told
me the real reason.

Units aren’t loyal. They work for good, they work for law
and order, they work for progress, because they consider these
things better than evil, anarchy and regression. But they aren’t
loyal. Loyalty is trust beyond reason, and no Unit ever trusted
beyond reason.

Units work for the U.A. because the U.A. is working for
things they agree about. But if a Unit finds itself in an impossible
position, it won’t fight to the last man. It’ll surrender.

As Jenson surrendered. This is what he told us.

The U.A., after all, wasn’t the only organization which could
make and train a Unit. The Traders had realised that to have
any chance against the U.A. they’d have to have a Unit of their
own. They’d bribed a psychologist to join them, clear five of
the Traders and train them as a Unit working for them.

We should have guessed this sooner. It was inevitable that
sooner or later anything used by the forces of law and order
should be used by the other side too.

“ If Kelman or West had done his job properly,” Jenson told
us, “ we’d have beaten you. We knew what you’d decide. We
could think as you were going to think. You were to decide
our base was Fryon. The Unit on Fryon was to get certain
hints once you’d given them the lead. Five of our ships were
to be found and destroyed. After that the Traders would go
under cover, and it would have been years before the U.A.
bothered us again.”

“ Very clever,” Dick agreed. “ Only you were bound to fail
anyway, Jenson.”

Jenson frowned at that. “ Because there were so many Units
against us ? That wouldn’t have mattered. We’d have — ”

“ No, because you weren’t a good Unit,” said Dick.

“ Nonsense. We’re every bit as good as you.”

UNIT Si

Dick shook his head. “ No. Because you had to be trained
to serve the Traders. You were given a bias.”

“ I know what you mean,” said Jenson, “ but you’re wrong.
We didn’t have to be biased. We were Traders already,
remember.”

“ Doesn’t matter,” said Dick. “ You see, whenever you were
cleared, you ceased to be Traders. Cleared, you became law-
abiding, and if you’d been properly trained you’d have been a
genuine Unit. You’d have realised the Traders couldn’t be
allowed to continue, and refused to work for them. They
probably didn’t tell you about it, but the men who trained you
had to instil a compulsion — loyalty to the Traders. And you
know as well as I do that any compulsion like that decreases the
efficiency of a Unit.”

Jenson shut his mouth firmly and wouldn’t say another word.
I think despite the compulsion he realised the truth of what
Dick was saying.

We rounded up the rest of the Trader Unit ourselves. It
was easy and undramatic. Like Jenson, each of the members
we found realised the game was up and gave no trouble.

But there was a grandstand ending to the episode nevertheless
— and everybody on Perryon saw at least some of it.

In a message to the police, when we were handing over the
Trader Unit, we mentioned the fleet and its time of arrival. We
knew that somehow the Traders would get this information.
Although the police in general weren’t under Trader control,
the Traders were bound to have some access to all important
official information.

The time we gave was an hour out.

When the Trader fleet took off to make its getaway before
the arrival of the fleet, it ran right into them.

I’ve said already that the lucky man really manufacturers his
luck. Units always seem to be lucky, because they fix things
so that chance is generally working for them, not against them.

Only a Unit would have gambled on the chance that the
Traders, warned, would rush to their ships and try to get away,
giving themselves an hour’s leeway. So only for a Unit could
it pay off.

The Trader ships tried to fight, which was a mistake. Probably
why they fought was because the Traders were angry. They
hadn’t expected anything like this.

52

NEW WORLDS

From Benoit City we saw the first Trader ship gleaming dull
red, then rosy pink, then white. It seemed to light the whole
sky. As it came down in a giant arc it must have been visible
over a quarter of the surface of Perryon. And before it struck
another ship had begun to glow.

The Traders scored a hit on one patrol ship. But it, ten
times the size of the Trader ships and with more than ten times
their defences, merely glowed with a curious green light and
withdrew rapidly from the battle.

Two Trader ships glowed at once and slanted down across
the sky, tracing fairy patterns. It was an incredibly beautiful
sight. I stared at the wonder of it, and only as the first ship
struck with a shock which could be felt but not heard realised
with sudden horror that there had been men on that ship.

When I remembered that the battle couldn’t be over too soon
for me. I understood how an executioner must feel. We had
sent those ships up to meet the patrol.

Before that we had left Rhoda Walker to go and warn Kelman
and be strangled. We had staged an accident in which Kelman
died.

I realised as yet another incandescent ship blazed across the
night sky just what it was to be a Unit Father.

The Uniteers were amoral. They worked for the general
good — but they did it like this, without mercy, without remorse,
without the irrational but very human feelings of pity that often
stop ordinary human beings doing harsh things they know
should be done . . . for the general good.

Still another ship blazed through the colours of fire. I turned
away. I couldn’t take pleasure any more in the excellent job
we had done.

“ Let’s get back to Twendon,” I said,“ and tell Lorraine all
about it.”

“Yes, we’ll do that,” Dick agreed. And he too turned his
back on the destruction of the Traders.

J. T. McIntosh

ON THE AVERAGE

53

This is one of those delightful plot-ideas for which Australian
writer Frank 8 ryning is becoming celebrated — the remote
possibility of a vehicle in space~being hit by a meteor. Mathe-
matical computations point out that the chances are infinitely
remote, but are calculated on the law of averages.

ON THE AVERAGE

By Frank B. Bryning

Anchored to the floor by his magnetic soles, Ted Price, B.
Chem., sat back on his heels in the effortless, knee-hugging
posture which was so easy to sustain in free orbit, where his
weight was nil. And made brief notations on his check list.
Before him and on either side the ladder-connected racks of
the storage bay in Laboratory 4 spiraled up from floor to ceiling.
Guard rails and wall clips embraced row upon row of gallon-
capacity carboys of liquid chemicals, each scrupulously labelled.

Suddenly Price ducked and crouched lower at the sound,
instant-short but menacing, of rupturing metal, shattering glass,
and a high-pitched, brief whistle. Breaking foot contact, he
flattened himself to the floor and pushed against the rack in.
front of him.

Backwards, an inch or two above the floor, he floated, until
his feet touched the bulkhead beyond the open end of the storage
bay, and he got them under him again. Keeping low, he peered
^cautiously upwards between fingers held over his eyes — and
blanched at what he saw.

54

NEW WORLDS

Drifting and spinning in the air were a myriad fragments of
broken glassware and globules of potent liquids ranging in size
from fine raindrops to large oranges. Like soap bubbles from
a child’s pipe the liquids floated in the zero gravity interior of
the space vehicle, moving here and there at random — grazing,
touching, colliding, coalescing, hissing, fuming, and rapidly
filling the confined space of the storage bay with gases of un-
guessable composition.

A glance showed Price that six carboys — three on one shelf
and three further along on the shelf below — had disintegrated
as if a slash had been made at them, diagonally, across the
shelving. Then his view was obscured by a white fog as, right
before his face, a large globule of ammonia collided with another
of hydrochloric acid, and enveloped him in an acrid cloud of
irritating, stinging, ammonium chloride.

Shutting his eyes tightly he swung away, coughing and gasping
to blunder into a grape-like cluster of ether globules.

“ Dr. Waddy ! ” he choked as he groped his way along the
bulkhead. “ Look out for ammonia . . . ether . . . Look
out ...”

On the laboratory side of the storage bay partition Senior
Chemist Charles Waddy gave no sign of having heard. With his
feet gripped by floor loops, he swayed about before his bench,
limply upright, a blood-red groove ploughed skull-deep across
his scalp.

In Laboratory 3, next door, chemists Brocklehurst and Wright,
who had been making quite a little noise on their own account
with a grinding wheel and glass tubing, had noticed
nothing amiss. After a few minutes, however, Wright found
Brocklehurst regarding him intently.

“ Something’s wrong with our air,” said Brocklehurst. “ Your
earlobe gauge shows an oxygen deficiency. How’s mine ? ”

“ Yours too,” confirmed Wrignt. “ And it’s getting cold in
here. We’re losing air !” Slipping his feet from the floor loops
he dived across to the intercom. “ I’ll report.”

Brocklehurst remained where he was, nis eyes scanning the
wall to his left, which was the outer wall of Vehicle Five —
Chemistry — on Satellite Space Station Commonwealth Two.
After twenty seconds he, too, slipped his foot loops, dived across
the room, and jerked open a small drawer built into tne wail
bench.

ON THE AVERAGE

55

“ Report also a half-inch perforation in outer wall of Lab
Three,” he called to Wright as he took a four-inch disc of rubber
from the drawer.

Levitating across to the perforation through which the air was
hissing, he first explored its edge with a fingertip. Then he
peeled the calico from the adhesive underside of the rubber disc
and slapped the patch over the hole. Dimpled in the middle
by the air pressure, and sealed by the cement of its underside, it
remained rigidly in position.

Facing about, Brocklehurst studied the bulkhead to his right
for several seconds.

“ And there’s another hole — same size- — in the bulkhead be-
tween Labs Three and Four ! ”

Meanwhile, Dr. Frank Thomas, Chief Chemist, and Officer
Commanding Vehicle Five — Chemistry — had begun to make the
“ all lines ” connection on his intercom on his own initiative.

“ General emergency ! ” he announced before Wright had
quite finished his report. “ Attention all personnel, Vehicle
Five ! Prepare to get airtight ! Prepare — to — get — airtight !”

He swung towards the wall and closed two switches. “ All
emergency airtight doors and air-duct cut-offs now closing. Ail
air control sectors now isolated. Suspect we have been holed
by a meteorite of approximately half-inch diameter in region of
Laboratory Three. All personnel check condition of air and
report to Air Control . . . Laboratory Three personnel, please
attend.”

“ Laboratory Three acknowledging,” came Wright’s voice at
once.

“ Lab Three personnel please check perforations and estimate
path of meteorite through section of Vehicle — and report.
Proceed.”

Thomas turned from his intercom to call Vehicle Two —
Administration— by radio-phone. But Wright again broke in :
“ Reporting from Lab Three. There’s a seepage of irritant gas
from Lab Four through perforation in bulkhead. Smells like
ammonium chloride, mainly—”

Thomas whirled back to the intercom, his face tense. “ Get
into oxygen helmet and skin protecting gloves — you and Brockle-
hurst,” he snapped, dropping the impersonal form of address.
“ Find out what’s wrong in Lab Four and get Waddy and Price
out if they’re in trouble. Also bring out sample of contaminated
air. Hurry 1 ”

NEW WORLDS

56

He cut in Air Control, who were calling him.

“ All sections reported except Laboratory Four,” said Air
Control. “ No reply from Lab P'our to our repeated call. Labs
Three and Five report lowered air pressure. All other sections
normal. Further report from Lab Three. Gas percolating from
Lab Four through — ”

Thomas cut off Air Control and flipped two other keys.

“ Personnel Laboratories One and Eight get into space suits
with radios immediately and report to me in person before fixing
helmets,” he ordered. “ Hurry ! Please be in my office in five
minutes. This is urgent ! ”

Cutting off, Thomas swung again to the inter-vehicle radio-
phone and called Administration.

“ Emergency 1” he announced. “ Vehicle Five — Chemistry —
calling ! O. C. Thomas speaking. Medical assistance required
urgently. Please relay — and hurry ! Vehicle Five penetrated by
half-inch meteorite. Personnel of Lab Four evidently incapaci-
tated. Injuries won’t be known until they are evacuated from
Lab. Evacuation now proceeding. Suspect two men overcome
by gases known to be polluting air of Lab Four. Possible skin
damage also. For Medical Officer’s information, ammonium
chloride has been recognised as principal gas. Please rush
medical aid. Emergency decontamination and maintenance
required also. But medical aid gets first priority,”

From his desk, close by the after observation ports of Vehicle
Two — Administration — Commander Mark Fraser, simply by
turning his head, could look down upon the other eighteen
Vehicles which made up Satellite Space Station Commonwealth
T wo. By sunlight, moonlight, or starlight the gleaming backs
of the other units of his command were dearly visible to the
unaided eye — in the assorted forms of spheres, drums, torpedoes,
turreted discs, “ doughnuts,” and spoked wheels, according
to their respective functions.

In two hanging echelons they circled Earth every ninety
minutes with astronomical precision. From Adminstration
Vehicle at the apex of the upper and leading echelon, they
stretched away to port and starboard, each pair a step lower than
the pair ahead — like an ever-widening staircase down to Earth
below.

As Fraser listened intently to the radio speaker on his desk,
relaying requests from O. C. Thomas and instructions from

ON THE AVERAGE

57

Administration for the relief of Vehicle Five, he swung his chair
around to face directly aft.

Second in line away to his left — two 300-foot spaces back and
two 200-foot spaces down — Vehicle Five was a disc eighty feet
in diameter and fifteen feet high. From its centre projected two
cylindrical turrets, one above and one below, each supplied with
an airlock. Serenely, Vehicle Five rode in the formation,
revealing no sign of the turmoil within.

Commander Fraser attended carefully to each manoeuvre in
the battle being waged by Frank Thomas in the defence of his
vehicle and his men. He had no intention of taking part—
except, if need be, to speed up some retarded operation by the
weight of his authority.

Thomas, the man on the spot, would know what the moves
should be — he far better than anyone else. For the time being
the resources of the entire Station would be at that hard-pressed
spaceman’s call, for Commander Fraser knew that his most
effective role was to stand by and make sure that Vehicle Five
got what it needed without delay.

It was perhaps, ironical that this should happen to Thomas,
whose preoccupation with the probabilities of meteorite collisions
— the main hazard to space-going vehicles and personnel — was
notorious. For Frank Thomas was one spaceman who had no
faith whatever in the so-called periods of immunity implied by
the statistics.

Not that he seriously challenged the statistics themselves.
Worked out on paper in the middle nineteen-sixties, they had
been confirmed rather than modified by fifty years of intervening
practical experience. They had, indeed, been a kind of manual
of arms for operating satellite stations and space rockets since
Satellite Space Station Commonwealth One had been established
in this very ninety-minute orbit.

But Thomas did question certain glib assumptions which were
supposed to be based on the statistics, and he could always be
relied upon to put up a strenuous argument when his point of
view was challenged.

According to the calculations a space-going vehicle presenting
a target of approximately one thousand square feet might reason-
ably expect to be hit by a meteoritic particle of about thirteen
millimeters’ diameter or larger about once in 611,874 years. Or
it might be struck by a particle of some five point twenty milli-
meters’ diameter or larger once in 23,858 years. Or it might

58

NEW WORLDS

even collide with a meteorite the size of a fine sand grain —
“ 1.12 millimeters’ diameter,” the statistics said — once in 233
years, on the average.

Fortunately most spacemen anticipated spending little more
than ten or twelve years of their lives in space — a few, perhaps,
up to twenty years. So they quite naturally rated their chances of
never meeting even a sand-grain meteorite as better than an
average sailor’s chances of never being shipwrecked. According
to the statistics, their anticipations were sound enough . . .

“ On the average ! ” Frank Thomas would always insist.
“ Don’t forget — the statistics mean nothing if they don’t also
mean an occasional inevitable hit as well as long periods of
immunity ! And don’t forget, either, that the smallest vehicle
here in ‘ Two ’ is more than two thousand square feet in longi-
tudinal section. I refer to Station Commonwealth One, as you
know. Most of us are bigger than three thousand square foot
targets. Chemistry Vehicle is five thousand or more. We must
divide those years of immunity, so called, by five ! Our two
hundred and thirty-three years become less than fifty !”

“ One grain of sand in fifty years !” someone had once pro-
tested.

“ Travelling at a hundred thousand miles an hour or more,”
Thomas had retorted, “ even that would sting a bit ! And don’t
forget that ‘ One ’ was out here only thirty-two years when
something as big as your fist went right through her ! ”

“ According to the statistics,” was the reply, given with a
grin, “ that should make this vicinity safe for anything up to a
half million years !”

At that point Thomas would throw up his hands in bitter
protest. It was just the kind of gratuitous assumption which
never failed to exasperate him.

“ On the average ! ” his companions would chorus, knowing
what he had in mind to say. And he would grin back, and not
say it.

For he had explained too often that, although “ once in a
thousand years on the average ” could mean that you might go
a thousand years, or two thousand, without a hit, it could just
as easily mean that you might collect the quota for two or three
thousand years in one day — or one hour. And he had pointed
out that if your one meteorite happened to be from a swarm like
the Leonids or the Giacobinids, in the season, there would
almost certainly be others close by, in space or time . . .

ON THE AVERAGE

59

It was therefore inevitable, as Commander Fraser appreciated
full well, that from time to time a fragment of cosmic stone or
nickel-iron large enough to survive the impact without volatilizing
would whip through one or another of his nineteen vehicles like
a bullet through a cardboard box, and then continue on its way.

So a standard procedure for such an emergency had been
worked out long since, and personnel had been drilled in it.
And so here he was at his post like any ship’s captain on his
bridge, in command while the well-planned techniques went into
operation.

With pencil and pad he made occasional notes, for there were
things to be learned in watching the system function and in
observing such innovations as were called forth by the special
circumstances of a particular occasion. His confidence in his
crews was considerable, and this time he felt reassured because
it was Frank Thomas in charge, a man whose special preoccu-
pation with meteorite hazards should make him the right one
to handle the emergency.

A movement on tne outside of Vehicle Eleven — Medical —
which headed the lower echelon, caught his eye. Two space-
suited figures, each with a bulky satchel at his back, had emerged
through the airlock and were hurrying around to the point
nearest Vehicle Five. In a beeline they blasted off without delay.

Realising now that there was something he could do, Com-
mander Fraser called Communications. “ Which Maintenance
Veiiicle is preparing emergency decontamination and repairs for
Veiucie Five ? ” he asked.

“ Vehicle Sixteen,” was the reply.

“ Get me Officer Commanding Vehicle Seventeen by radio-
phone, please ...”

Like babes in arms the casualties from Laboratory 4 were
brought out by Brocklehurst and Wright and handed over, limp
and weightless, to First Aid. Hastily dumping their helmets in
wall clips the rescuers reported in person, with the sample of
contaminated air, to O. C. Thomas, who had with him Senior
Chemist Harrison from Laboratory Seven.

“ Here’s your sample, Harrison,” said Thomas, nodding
towards the stoppered flask brought in by Wright. “ Give me a
quick opinion before the Medical Officer gets here — then a
detailed analysis as soon as you can do it.”

As Harrison left with the flask Thomas called in the four men
standing by in space suits. Then he spoke to Brocklehurst.
“ What happened to Waddy and Price ? ”

6o

NEW WORLDS

“ They’re both unconscious,” answered Brocklehurst. “ Dr.
Waddy has a scalp wound and might be both stunned and gassed.
Price apparently gassed. By the smell — you can probably get
it now from our clothing — both ammonium chloride and ether
are present in quantity. The atmosphere in Lab Four is a white
fog, typical of — ” He mentioned an equation — NH-CL.

“ Any idea how it happened ? ”

“ Apparently the meteorite went through their stores bay,
smashing some bottles. The air is filled with broken glass,
globules of liquids, and — fog.”

Thomas called again to Administration. “ Please hurry
medical aid. We are standing by airlock in Turret One to take
in medical personnel.”

“ Doctors Buchanan and Seddon approaching your Vehicle
now,” replied Administration. “ They will reach you in about
forty seconds.”

Thomas nodded to the four men in space suits, who were still
holding their helmets in their hands.

“ You heard ? Get space-tight and proceed, please.”

Before the two doctors were properly out of their space suits
Brocklehurst had briefed them and handed Harrison’s prelimin-
ary analysis of the sample of polluted atmosphere to Senior
Medical Officer Buchanan.

In the sick bay, with his nostrils twitching at the sting of
ammonia, and his eyes keenly scanning the faces of the victims,
Buchanan opened his kit at once and took out a rubber bulb
syringe and a bladder of sterile water.

“ Eyes first,” he said to Dr. Seddon. “ Wash by squirting
water.”

Inserting the syringe in the twisted neck of the bladder he
filled the syringe. Seddon did likewise with his own equipment.
Returning the water bladder Buchanan took out a wad of cotton
wool and bent over Price.

“ Flush the eyes and then dry quickly,” he intoned, suiting his
actions to the words. “ Flush again, and repeat several times.
Never mind where the spray flies as long as it goes away from
the eyes.”

Drying Price’s eyes for the fifth time he returned syringe and
cotton wool to his kit and brought out a tube of unguent.

“ Apply anti-burn ointment generously to the eyes,” he
advised, demonstrating on Price. Then he handed the ointment

ON THE AVERAGE

61

to Dr. Seddon, wiped his hands on some cotton wool, and drew
on sterile rubber gloves.

“ Now, while I inspect that scalp wound on your patient, Dr.
Seddon, will you please clean up the face and exposed skin of
this one and apply a smear of ointment ? He’s had the worse
dose of gas.”

“ His breathing sounds worse, too,” agreed Dr. Seddon.
“ Much more bubbling.”

“ Mucous discharge in lungs and bronchial tubes, as we might
expect. Better stop it immediately with a shot of stropin — for
both of them.”

“ A hundredth for the worse case — something less for the
other ? ”

“ Yes. Say a hundred-and-fiftieth for the lesser one. Or
possibly a little more.”

Both doctors worked in silence for some minutes. When Dr.
Buchanan straightened up from his examination of Dr. Waddy’s
wound he looked grimly at Brocklehurst.

“ Please request Administration to send a workshops tender
as an ambulance — and urgently. We’ll have to take both patients
oyer to Medical.” He turned to Dr. Seddon. “ Dr. Waddy has
sustained a depressed fracture. Pressure on the parietal lobe,
I feel certain. We’ll have to trephine. We’ll take Price also —
for observation and treatment.”

Brocklehurst was already calling O. C. Thomas by intercom.
A few moments later he turned to Dr. Buchanan.

“ Ambulance tender now making corridor seal with airlock in
Turret Two of this Vehicle. We will be ready to receive patients
in three minutes.”

“ Good !” exclaimed Buchanan, and turned again to his
patient. Then he straightened up once more. “ But surely not
— yet ? How — so soon ?”

Brocklehurst shrugged. “ The tender has been standing by
alongside for some minutes. With Commander Fraser’s com-
liments. He, anticipated the possible need . . .”

Commander Fraser watched as the Chemistry Vehicle’s
concertina-like corridor tube was unsealed from the ambulance
tender’s airlock and retracted. Lines for and aft were cast off
and drawn into the tender, and the two space-suited men from
Laboratory Eight slowly manhandled the tender away from
Vehicle Five.

62

NEW WORLDS

Slowly the egg-like tender swung about in response to its
trimming gyroscopes until its attitude was correct for approach
to Vehicle Eleven — Medical. Its jets fluttered for a few seconds
only, and as it drifted down towards Medical it slowly turned
about again, to approach jets foremost. Precisely the same
measured few seconds of firing brought it to a near-stop within
yards of Vehicle Eleven, where now three space-suited figures
awaited it.

Quickly the lines fore and aft were ejected, made fast, and
the tender warped in. Another spacetight corridor connection
was made for transfer of the patients.

Back on Vehicle Five two writhing, sausage-like forms bal-
looned suddenly forth from the outer hatches of two space-
cupboards of Laboratory Four, as the polluted air was evacuated
from inside.

The outside men removed the two bladders, moored them to
the hull of Vehicle Five, and affixed two others. These, a short
time later, were similarly inflated, although less tightly than the
former two, as the space-suited men inside Laboratory Four
operated the hatches in the diminishing, rarefying, and chilling
atmosphere.

After six filled envelopes were moored to the outside, both
space-cupboards of Laboratory Four were opened to space, and
the last faint remnants of the attenuated atmosphere were
allowed to go to waste.

The six envelopes of contaminated air had contracted to
twisted rigid “ ropes ” by the time Commander Fraser returned
to his desk six hours later. Having radiated their heat away
into space, their contents had contracted, liquified, and frozen
into solid incrustations which would later be retrieved, separated
chemically, and re-bottled.

Even the broken glass trapped by the wire mesh screens across
the inner hatches of the space-cupboards would be re-melted
and blown into laboratory glassware again. For the economies
of space-going vehicles is such that it is important to conserve
every ounce of material once transported into space rather than
expend rocket fuel, in the costly mass-ratios involved in the
Earth-to-Satellite ferry services, on one unnecessary ounce.

On Commander Fraser’s desk w’as clipped a brief report and
a transcript of the major intercom, radio-phone, and video
conversations recorded during the episode aboard Vehicle Five.
After perusing these documents and an up-to-the-minute medical
report from Dr. Buchanan, Fraser called Communications.

ON THE AVERAGE 63

“ Leave a message with Vehicle Five asking O. C. Thomas to
call me when he returns to duty,” he requested.

Moments later, Communications called back. “ O. C. Thomas
on Vehicle Five is on duty now, Commander. Shall we — ? ”

“ Get him please — on video.”

As the screens to the right of their desks cleared simultaneously,
Commander Fraser and O. C. Thomas looked one another in
the eyes. Thomas was drawn and weary looking.

“ Have you rested during the past six hours, Dr. Thomas ?”
Fraser demanded.

“ Well sir — I wanted to be sure everything was ship-shape
before — ”

“ As from now, my boy, you go off duty for twenty-four hours
and get some rest. I’ll arrange your relief.”

“ Thank you, Commander. But I should first inspect the
repairs to — ”

“ Nonsense ! Don’t be so damned conscientious, Thomas i
You can leave those things in charge of the maintenance captain
now. He’ll have to report to you in any event, later.”

“ I know sir. But I feel responsib — ”

“ Your responsibilities on this occasion have been fully dis-
charged long since— and superlatively well, too. Thanks to your
prompt handling of the emergency both Waddy and Price will
come out of it without permanent injury.”

“ I am very glad of that news, Commander. Thank you.”

“ And your Vehicle has been ably defended and commanded,”
Fraser went on determinedly. “ You are to be commended on
your handling of the situation. When you are back on duty you
can elaborate on some of these notes, and we’ll gain a few points
to improve Standard Procedure. Your improvisations were
excellent, without exception.”

“ You flatter me, sir. I feel that I merely reacted to each
problem as it arose. I had nothing preconceived except Standard
Procedure.”

“ Other than your well-known preoccupation with this very
subject ! But we’ll take that up later. Meanwhile you must go
off duty. That is an order ! ”

Thomas saluted in acquiescence.

“ I have only to pass on to Maintenance this requisition for
immediate replacement of oxygen and helium lost, or temporarily
fouled in flushing Laboratory Four,” he said. “ We are right
out of reserves, so may I count on you, sir, to approve and relay
it as urgent ? In case of emergency we would be — ”

64

NEW WORLDS

“ I shall, of course 1 ” said the commander promptly. “ But
don’t tell me you expect another emergency within twenty-four
hours or so !”

Thomas gave a tired grin in answer to the quizzical gleam in
his superior’s eye. “ My obsession on that point is well known,
I admit, sir. But it could quite easily — ”

The sound of a single, sharp smack, and the sight of the loosely-
held papers fluttering from Fraser’s hand startled both of them.
Withdrawing his hand from his cheek, where it had gone auto-
matically to touch a sharp, stinging burn, Commander Fraser
looked in horror at his fingertips.

“ Blood !” His eyes again met those of the younger space-
man. Catching a floating sheet of paper he examined it, then
held it up to show Thomas a neat, pea-sized hole drilled through
it. “I see what you mean !”

Whacking the paper down on his desk he flipped a row on
intercom keys.

“ Emergency ! Attention all personnel, Vehicle Two !
Prepare to get airtight ! Prepare — to — get — airtight . , . 1 ”

Frank B. Bryning

THE UTERARY LINE-UP

Author Kenneth Bulmer has developed into one of the rising
stars of British science fiction during the past year. So much
so that we prevailed upon him to write our next serial, which
has more than come up to expectations. “ Green Destiny,”
commencing next month, is an under-ocean story concerning
farming the Continental shelves, of warfare between the various
commercial combines involved, and bitter rivalry between the
Under Ocean Patrol and the Interplanetary Control for world
funds to develop their own particular researches. Plus a lot of
other feasible ideas now being developed by skin-divers.

Story ratings for No. 53 were :

1. Tourist Planet (Part II)

2. We’re Only Human -

3. Birthright -

4. } Tree Dweller -

j- The Neutral - - - . -

We Call It Home - - -

James White
John Kippax
Arthur Sellings
George Longdon
Alan Barclay
Sydney J. Bounds

THE GREATER IDEAL

65

Mr. Guthrie’s literary efforts are none too frequent, but when
they do appear they are usually worthwhile. For instance, in
the first contact between human and alien which would be the
greater ideal — the hand of friendship or the mailed fist ?

THE GREATER IDEAL

By Alan Guthrie

On earth the statue is of bronze, gigantic, imposing, a true
work of art. On Mars it is of sandstone polished to an incredible
smoothness while the one on Venus was carved from a solid
block of crystolite. The materials, like the size, do not matter.
Whether it is of bronze, sandstone or crystolite, the planetary
monument — or one of the countless smaller ones made from
every imaginable material and set in towns and villages, hung
against walls or set in medallions — the image is the same. That
of a man, arms extended in welcome, head tilted as if to stare
at the stars, a smile on his face and his thin, aesthetic features
set in resolute determination. There is an inscription, a simple
thing but of six words : HE MADE US WHAT WE ARE.

There are those who insist that it is not a true likeness, that
the eyes should have been covered by the old-fashioned spectacles
he wore. But it is hard to portray spectacles in sculpture,
invariably they hide the eyes behind blank windows and the eyes
are very important.

For it was the eyes of Michael Denninson which first saw the
Houmi.

66

NEW WORLDS

The ship was a leaking old freighter beating around the fifth
decant in search of the rich minerals of the Asteroids. It was
common of its type, a metal can mostly cargo space, the rest
loaded with stores and supplies, some mining tools and explo-
sives, the whole powered by an erratic atomic engine.

Michael Denninson was the astrogator and one half of the
crew. He was a tall man with weak eyes and girlishly slim.
Physically he was not strong but, in space, animal strength is
not important. He was strong where it counted most and his
brain and skill governed the ship. Holden was the captain, a
dour, grizzled veteran who drank often and slept much. He
was asleep when Michael first caught the flash of reflected sun-
light. He awoke as the rockets kicked to life.

“ What is it ? ”

“ Something bright at two o’clock.” Denninson pointed at
the telescreen. “ See it ? ”

Holden grunted, rubbing his chin. He stepped up the magni-
fication of the screen as the flash was repeated and swore at
what he saw.

“ Metal. That thing’s a ship.”

“ That’s what I thought.” Michael adjusted the controls
and, in the screen, the flashing object moved to a point directly
ahead “ Salvage ? ”

“ Could be.” Holden was eager now. Salvage was always
profitable even though it was nothing but twisted metal. Such
metal would be refined and be worth more than any of the
common ores. And there might be other pickings. “ Better
try them on the radio,” he suggested. “ They might still be
alive in there.”

The radio brought no reply and neither of them had really
expected any. A ship, twisting out of control among the Aster-
oids, could only be a ship that had been abandoned. The risk
of collision with a hunk of cosmic debris was too great for any
crew to have willingly run. They would have abandoned ship
long ago.

As they came closer Michael caught the first hint of something
unusual.

“ Odd shape,” he mused. “ Do you recognise it ? ”

Holden didn’t. The vessel was a polyhedron and outside of
his experience. Most ships were dumbell or torpedo shaped or,
as in their own case, a series of spheres united by external struts.

“ An experimental job, perhaps ? ” His eagerness increased
as he thought about it. “ And no signs of external damage.
We’re in luck.”

THE GREATER IDEAL

67

“ Majbe.” Michael was working at the controls. “ I’ll try
them with visual. Their radio could be wrecked but, if there’s
anyone alive in there, they’ll see our signals.”

From a point on their hull a low-powered rocket streamed a
trail of fire, exploded in a flaming gush of brilliance, hung
glowing in the void for a long moment and then faded in an
expanding cloud of luminescence. Again Michael repeated the
signal, a third time, then Holden released his breath in a sigh
of regret.

From a point on the polyhedral hull a winking glow replied
to their signal. The ship still held life.

What followed was routine and a perfect example of Michael’s
skill. He played the jets until they had matched both velocity
and revolution, coupled the contact tube to a dark spot which
had yawned on the strange hull and flooded it with air. Together,
without suits, without weapons, with no thought than that of
offering aid to their own kind, the two men entered the other
ship.

And met the Houmi.

The meeting was momentous, though at first it didn’t appear
so. The mind cannot grasp more than a little at a time. First
there was the strangeness, the thrill of meeting, for the first
time in recorded history, another intelligent race. Then there
were the questions, the million unanswerable questions which
had to be left for sheer lack of communication. And, finally,
there was the problem of what had to be done.

“ Aliens.” Holden shook his head at the wonder of it. Both
he and Michael had returned to their own vessel. “ Who’d
have thought it ? ”

“ Humanoid,” said Michael. “ Man-like in almost every
respect.” He moved restlessly about the control room. “ Do
you realise what this means, Holden ? Can you grasp it ? ”

“ I think so.” Holden was a realist, a practical man undis-
turbed by self-doubts and self-questioning. “ We’ve bumped
into something really big. I wonder where they came from ? ”

“ I’ll find out,” promised Michael. “ I’ll find out many
things.” His eyes, behind their spectacles, gleamed with vision.
“ Think of it, Holden. They have come from outside the system,
from another star. Their technology must be far higher than
our own.”

“ How can you know that ? ”

68

NEW WORLDS

“ They are too much like us to have come from within the
system. They breathe the same air, have the same eye-structure,
and their ears are pointed but much like our own.” He nodded
as though it was already settled as a fact. “ Different, of course,
but no more different than a negro is from a white man. I’d
be willing to bet that they could live comfortably on earth.”

“ I see what you mean.” Holden was thoughtful. “ They
must have some form of an interstellar drive.” He stirred at
the astrogator. “ We must get that drive.”

“ We must help them to repair their ship.”

“ The drive comes first.” Holden sucked in his lips. “ Think
of it, Michael ! With an invention like that we could be rich.”
“ Money ! ” The way Michael said it made it sound like an
insult. “ Is that all you can think of ? ”

“ No.” Holden didn’t take offence. He had argued with
Michael before and neither of them had ever reached an agree-
ment. Denninson was a peculiar man, which was why he and
Holden could operate successfully as a two-man crew. He was
much given to reading ; old books written by people long dead
and spent long hours staring at the majesty of the universe. He
was an idealist, a fact Holden knew. That he was also a fanatic
was something the captain had yet to find out.

“ Look,” he said patiently. “ What have we ? A strange ship
from somewhere outside. Luckily for us it has been damaged
and, luckier still, we found it before it crashed on the rocks.
So that makes it ours to do with as we like. Agreed ? ”

“ No.” Michael was definite. “ This ship isn’t salvage.”

“ I’m not talking about salvage,” said Holden. “ I’m talking
about common sense. We need that interstellar drive, they have
it, we have them. Simple.”

“ You talk like a savage,” said Michael. “ These people
aren’t primitives to be exploited. If we take their ship and
drive we will be worse than thieves. We will have stranded
them far from home.” He paced the floor again, his magnetic
boots sending dull echoes from the hull. “ And what if we do
get the drive, what then ? ”

“ We’ll go out to the stars,” said Holden simply. “ What
else ? ”

“ And land on new worlds and give birth to more copies of
earth.” Michael shook his head. “ It will be the same old
story but this time played on a greater scale. The explorers
first, then the merchants, then the armies and another race,

THE GREATER IDEAL

69

another people subjugated beneath our heel. It happened to
the negro. It happened to the red man. It has happened with
monotonous regularity all through our history. Do you think
that men will change overnight just because they have a new
toy ? ”

“ We heed the drive,” said Holden stubbornly. “Words
can’t alter that. We need it and we’re going to take it.”

“ No.” It was almost a shout. Michael realised it and
lowered his voice. “ Listen,” he said urgently, “ and try to
understand. We’ll get the drive, yes, but not by stealing it.
We’ll receive it as a gift from the Houmi. They’ll give us the
drive and all the other secrets of their technology because they
will want to. We will be their friends, their brothers in space,
and together we will share all that we own.” His eyes were
gleaming as he thought about it. “ A new start, Holden. An-
other race to teach and guide us and lead us from the slime
from which we sprang. Is it worth losing the greater ideal for
the sake of a petty theft ? ”

Holden didn’t answer. He sat, his head lowered, staring at
the deck plates beneath his feet. He was thinking, not of the
greater ideal expounded by the astrogator, but of things of more
immediate moment. He was thinking of his life and the poverty
that had been his and the riches waiting for him if he were
strong enough and brave enough to take them. Michael was an
idealist, he knew that, and privately considered the other man
a fool. And yet he was a clever fool. He lifted his head.

“ Talk,” he said. “ Nice talk, but talk just the same. How
do you know how the Houmi will feel about this hand-in-hand
stuff ? They may not want to help us and we may not want
to mingle with them. Just because they look human doesn’t
mean that they are human.” He sucked in his breath. “ They
are alien, never forget that. More alien than bees are to men.
Do we ask the permission of a bee before we take its honey ? ”

“ Sophistry,” said Michael impatiently. “ Backwoods logic.
You should know better.”

“ Maybe I do know better.” Holden was annoyed. He did
not like being spoken to as a fool. “ So we fix their ship and
wave them goodbye and then what ? Maybe they’ll never come
back or maybe they’ll come back in force. Either way we’ve
lost.” He rose to his feet. “ Mix with them, yes, but on equal
terms. You say that they’ll act like humans, all right. I know
humans and how they act, not from books but from life. The
strong respect the strong. The weak respect the strong. Both
despise the weak.” He reached out towards the radio.

7 o

NEW WORLDS

“ What are you doing ?” Michael’s voice was high-pitched,
strained.

“ This thing is too big for us.” Holden tripped a switch.
“ I’m going to call up some help.”

“ And then ? ”

“ Then we’ll do things my way. We’ll take the drive and
anything else we can find. Later, when we’ve built interstellar
ships of our own, we may go visiting. Or we may not.”

“ And the Houmi ? ”

Holden shrugged.

Michael was an idealist and a fanatic and so was far more
dangerous than Holden had suspected. His dream had been
nurtured by old philosophies and forgotten injustices and, in
the face of the greater ideal, nothing could be permitted to
stand in his way. Nothing. Not even Holden’s life. He was
regretful but determined.

“ I’m sorry,” he said. “ But I had to do it.”

“You almost cracked my skull.” Holden tugged at his bonds
and stared at the other man. “ How long have I been out ? ”

“ A long time.” Michael hesitated. “ I had to drug you
after I stopped you using the radio. Then the repairs took
longer than I thought. They are all finished now though.”
He stared at a point above Holden’s head. “ You were quite
wrong about them, you know. I’ve learned a little of their lan-
guage and they’re quite sincere. They want to see earth, I’m
travelling with them as a kind of ambassador, and they promise
to return.”

“ And me ? ”

“ I’m sorry.” Michael lowered his eyes. “ You’ll have to
stay here.”

“ Tied ? Like this ? ” Holden strained at his bonds then
relaxed. “ That’s murder,” he said quietly. “ Is that what you
want ? ”

“ I don’t trust you.”

“ What’s trust got to do with it ? ” Holden was frightened
now, Michael meant exactly what he said. “What harm»can
I do ? You’ve had your own way, the Houmi’s ship has been
repaired, what more do you want ? ”

Michael didn’t answer.

“ You’re frightened that I’ll upset your plans, is that it ? ”
Holden laughed, a short sound without humour. “ Well, maybe

THE GREATER IDEAL

7i

I’d try if I could. But what damage can I do now ? ” He began
to sweat. “ At least you could cut me free and leave me the ship.”

“ The ship isn’t spaceworthy,” said Michael. “ I had to use
most of the parts for the repairs and I’ll need the radio, of course,
the Houmi don’t use our type of communication. I’m sorry.”

“ You’re going to lie,” said Holden with sudden understanding.
“ You’re going to tell them that the Houmi rescued you from a
wrecked ship. You’re going to say that because you want us
to be friendly towards them and you think that lie will help
things along.” He sneered. “ Crazy logic ! They helped us,
therefore they must be friends, therefore we must be friendly
towards them. Lies ! All lies ! ”

Michael rose to his feet.

“You fool ! ” screamed Holden. “You blind, stupid fool !
Don’t you know that you’re selling out your own race ? ”

Michael stepped towards the door. He spoke once before he
left Holden to his fate. “ I’m sorry,” he said. “ I wish that
you could understand.”

“ Go to Hell,” said Holden, and turned his face to the wall.

Michael Denninson did not go to hell, not then, though he
may have done later when he died by his own hand. He went
to earth with his friends the Houmi where, partly because of
his lie, they were made welcome. They gave us some of their
secrets, little things of no real value but, we thought, a promise
of what was to come. That was all they gave us, toys and the
assurance that they would return. A promise which they kept
only too well.

The Houmi look almost human but they are not human and,
what is worse, they do not regard us as human. Human, that
is, by their own standards. And yet they have a wry sense of
humour. It was they who insisted on the statues immortalizing
Michael Denninson, the most hated man in the entire history of
the human race. It was they who permitted the inscription
and in this they reveal their lack of irony. Or perhaps they just
don’t care. For as every schoolchild knows the inscription, as
it stands, is true but indefinite. It lacks a hyphen and one other
word.

—SLAVES.

Alan Guthrie

72

NEW WORLDS

A

L

0

N

E

It is a pleasure to welcome back to our pages author Bertram
Chandler, especially with the type of zestful short story by
which he has become so well-known. Now living permanently in
Australia he is an added asset to the small . but growing number
of writers who reside “ down under.’

By Bertram Chandler

Illustrated by JACKSON

You have no conception (he said) of what it’s like. You may
think that you know loneliness, you may have stood by yourself
on a mountain top or on the beach of an unhabited island and
said, “ I am alone.” But all around you — out of sight but only,
relatively speaking a stone’s throw away — have been the teeming
billions of Earth. Your mind has been aware — subconsciously,
perhaps, but still aware — of the emanations of love and friend-
ship, courage, hate and fear. You have . . . belonged. Even
Corderey, the first man to land on the Moon, was not cut off
as I was ; the Moon is close, a scant two hundred and forty
thousand miles. It is well inside the range — not that it matters
now that the Colony has been established.

Corderey was lucky. He was never too far away — and, besides,
his radio was working. And he had only to step out of his ship
and look up at the sky to Earth, to home, a familiar globe, not
a featureless point of green light in the evening or the morning
sky. He knew that to return he would have to endure five days
only in Space — five days, not nine months !

Yes, gentlemen, I know that you had decided against using a
two man ship for the second attempt to reach Mars. I know

that it is better for a man to be alone than for him to come, in
time (and all too short a time !) to hate the comrade with whom
he is cooped up in a tin coffin. I know that the risk of insanity
is preferable to the risk of insanity and murder. I didn’t know
(but neither did you) of the psychic field, the aura, surrounding
Earth. I took the risk — but I didn’t know how great a risk it
was.

I was about three weeks out when I first noticed the loneliness.
Have you ever lost a loved one ? Have you ever, in the dead of
night, awakened from a real, too real, dream of the past, and

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NEW WORLDS

stretched out a hand and found not the warm, familiar flesh
(gone for all time), but . . . nothing ? Have you ? Then you’ll
have some faint (you’ll never know how faint, you’re not young
enough, not fit enough for the long haul) idea of what it’s like.
It was more than mental. It was emotional and — even — physical.
The horror of the nothingness outside the control room ports
made me vomit.

No, I didn’t report it. I should have done, I know. But
I was Iron Man McGinnis, the tough guy. McGinnis, the first
man on Mars. (And I was — but it was a long, long road to
travel before I got there). So I was tough. So I wasn’t going
to squeal before I was hurt — even though I was hurt ; badly,
irrepairably. After all — I had the radio, I had the dozen or
so games of chess that I was playing with various people in the
Lunar Base and the Space Stations. I had my long conversa-
tions, whenever I wanted them, with the Colony and the
Satellites.

But there was no warmth in it. It was like talking with ghosts,
with less than ghosts — for ghosts do, presumably, effect the
emotions of human beings. And I was outside the range of
Earth’s emotional aura. All that I was getting was sonic vibra-
tions transformed into etheric vibrations and transformed back
into sound. There was no . . . feeling. It was like the effect
(or the lack of effect) of a player piano on a music lover.

Even so, I made do with the radio for another month. Even
though I was in an emotional vacuum it gave me intellectual
companionship. I could even appreciate — although not fully —
the outrageous stories of which old Willis, the Second in Com-
mand of Satellite Three, has such an unlimited stock. And there
was, of course, the chess.

No, it wasn’t too bad for a while. You can get used to any-
thing — to almost anything — in time. And there was the know-
ledge — not the feeling, but the knowledge — that all Earth was
behind me and that I could demand, at any time that suited
me, a conversation with any one of her population, great or small,
king or commoner, president or pauper. That universal hook-
up was, you say, the least that you could do for me — but it
helped. I was alone, more alone than any man has ever been,
but I was an emperor riding the empty skies and my subjects,
although millions of miles away, were, within clearly defined
limits, my slaves.

It was a blow when the radio went. You assured me, gentle-
men, that my orbit ran well clear of all known meteor swarms,

ALONE

75

and I have been told often enough how astronomical the odds
are against a collision between a spaceship and even a small
meteor. Nevertheless, there was a meteor swarm — a large one.
The radar gave warning and the automatic evasion units took
over, giving me barely time enough to wrap myself around a
stanchion to wait for the sudden accelerations and decelerations.
Luckily I was in the hydroponics room at the time — I had
remembered the experiments of and theories of Dr. Chandra
Bose early in the century and was trying to goad the plants into
some sort of emotional response — and not in Control. It might
have been better, perhaps, if I had been in the control room.

I felt the impact and heard the explosion as the meteor hit
us. I heard the automatically controlled airtight doors slam
shut. For long seconds I clung to the stanchion— I didn’t know
whether or not we were clear of the swarm, whether or not the
automatic evasion units were still working — and I didn’t want
to be hurled and broken against a bulkhead by a sudden blast
from the Drive.

At last I deemed it safe to investigate. I broke out the emer-
gency suit from its locker, shrugged myself into it. I squeezed
through tne sphincter airlock into the cabin. There was no
damage there. I squeezed through the airlock into Control. The
hole in the shell — remarkably smooth, it was, its edges fused by
the heat of the impact — I saw at first glance. It would not be,
I was relieved to find, too large to patch. The controls seemed
to be undamaged, and the radar. Emmie— the Electro Magnetic
Navigational Integrator and Calculator ; rather strange that I
should have given the thing a female name ! — was ticking away
quite happily in her corner. At first I was relieved to see that
all the really important items of equipment had survived un-
scathed. I wasn’t so pleased when I saw that it was the radio
that had borne the full brunt of the impact. Even with the spares
I carried it was beyond repair. Oh, I could have got it working
by stripping the radar and Emmie — but I doubted my ability
to complete the voyage without their aid.

It was after the destruction of the radio that I lost all count
of time. I must have performed my routine navigational duties
- — although I can’t remember doing so — because when at last
Mars loomed huge and ruddy on the screens the ship had been
swung on the gyroscopes, had already been subjected to the
necessary deceleration. But I don’t remember doing it. All
that I remember is the endless hours of reading the microfilm

NEW WORLDS

76

books, the vague wonderment I felt that such people as the
characters in the novels and biographies actually existed. The
human race was something I had heard about once — but I
found it hard to believe that such irrational beings had ever
existed, could ever exist. But I was human , I kept telling myself
with a sort of desperate urgency. But I couldn’t believe it. I
couldn’t feel it.

- But we were coming in for a landing. I did all the things
that I was supposed to do, made sure that the machines were
doing the things that they were supposed to do. I’ll not bore
you, gentlemen, with the details. You know all about astro-
nautics— on paper, at any rate. You know all about astronautics
when it’s a matter of only four days from the Station to the
Moon.

I came in for the landing. The atmosphere was a little thicker
than predicted, and a deal more turbulent. But the servo-
mechanisms kept the ship upright, corrected every yaw. I
should have been excited. But I was dead, dead ... I was the
first man on Mars — and I was less worked up about it all than
a city office worker dropping down in his helicopter to his
suburban back garden.

The realisation that the canals were, after all, just that raised
a faint thrill. And then when I saw what was unmistakably a
city — tall, shadow-casting buildings, a latticework of streets —
I felt the stirrings of interest. A city meant — people. They
might be, to my eyes, unholy monstrosities, but surely they would
know emotions. Even if my coming inspired only hate and fear
it would be better than nothing. It would be a cool, green
oasis to a thirst-crazed traveller in the desert.

I took over the controls then. I did not bother to weigh the
pros and cons. All I wanted to do was to land as close to the
city as possible, to meet the Martians as soon as possible, to
plunge my parched being into a deep, warm bath of raw emotion.
I selected my landing place — an apparently level plain on the
bank of the wide canal — and dropped with more enthusiasm
than caution.

It must have been spectacular, that landing. We must have
hit like a meteorite. But the ship was stout enough to take the
shock, and so was I. After all — I was not called Iron Man
McGinnis for nothing.

I didn’t bother with any of the routine tests — atmospheric
pressure and content, temperature and so forth. I zipped myself
into a suit, hung weapons — my heavy pistol and an axe — on my

ALONE

77

belt and hurried into the airlock. I opened the outer door with-
out bothering to pump the air in the compartment back into
the ship. I scrambled down the ladder to the dry, ocherous
rubble on which the ship had landed.

The city was little more than half a mile awa>. Its slender
towers stood sharply against the dark blue sky. And there was
movement around the towers, around their tapering spires. And
the flying things, I soon saw, were coming towards me.

Like huge dragonflies they were, but all out of proportion.
The bodies were too slender, the wings too long and too wide.
Through my helmet I could hear the faint, high singing of their
flight. As they drew nearer I could see that they were not
living beings, but machines — the glitter of their bodies was
unmistakably metallic. Yet there was something alive about the
way they flew, something that argued intelligent, although not
infallible direction.

They circled me warily, twenty of them, flying in line ahead
in a wide circle. The whine of their rapidly vibrating wings
was as maddening as that of a mosquito. I shouted at them,
but they seemed not to hear. I jumped and waved.

I was mad, then. I was mad with disappointment and . . .
hunger. I was expecting that now I had come to an inhabited
world I should feel, once again, the subtle emanations given out
by all life. But I was as lonely, as alone, as at any time during
that long, long voyage.

I had to make them notice me. I had to make them feel
something towards me — anything so long as it was strong enough,
fierce enough. I had to feel their hate, their fear.

The pistol was in my hand. I took careful aim, making allow-
ance for deflection. I fired. One of the flying things staggered
in its flight, a pair of flimsy, shimmering wings drifted slowly
to the ground. The Martian hit the ground first.

I ran to it, dropping the pistol and pulling the axe from my
belt. I brought the blade crashing down on the long, slim body,
laughing savagely as delicate springs and slender rods spilled
out on to the coarse sand. I smashed in the head of the thing,
laughing again as I exposed a grey pulpy mass that squirmed
and shrank from the blade, that oozed a thin ichor on to the arid
soil.

But still I felt nothing. Still I was alone.

Did these beings know no hate, no fear ? They were organic
— in part, at least. Death should mean as much to them as it
meant to me, as it should mean to me. As it didn’t . . .

78

NEW WORLDS

Slowly I walked back to where my pistol, gleaming and deadly,
lay on the sand. Slowly I stooped and picked it up. The feel
of it, the weight of it, were comforting. I was a dead man in all
but physical fact. Soon— by the mere pressure of a finger — -
I should be a dead man. I was mildly amazed that I hadn’t
thought of it before.

But the infernal mosquito whine of the Martians’ wings was
stepping up its frequency, was painfully high and thin. I tried
to raise my arm, tried to bring the automatic up to my head,
but nerves and muscles were somehow out of my control. I
tried to raise my eyes to look at the Martians to see what they
were doing. I tried — but my head was immovable.

Then, suddenly, I was tired — very tired.

I crumpled to the sand.

I slept.

They were good to me, the Martians. I had killed one of
their number, but they bore no malice. They carried me into
their city and placed me in a pressurised room ; and when I
awoke, greatly refreshed, I found that they had provided every
comfort that it was possible for them to do.

One of them came into the room to talk to me. I did not find
him at all repellent — he was elegant, graceful, so much so that
I was keenly aware of my own gross body. He talked to me,
I say, and told me that his people had been observing the Earth
• — and at close range — for generations. They had learned our
various languages long since. Before I could express my incredu-
lity he produced from a pouch belted to his body a bundle of
newspapers, some of them fifty years old. He showed me, in
these same papers, reports of mysterious objects seen in the sky
reports of the sighting of things called “ flying saucers.” He
produced a packet of cigarettes. The tobacco was dry and
powdery, but it was smokable. He lit my cigarette with the tip
of a metallic tentacle that glowed suddenly red.

He asked, then, why I had killed.

I told him. I told him of the loneliness, of the madness that
had come with it. I told him that I was still lonely, that I was
still alone. And as I talked I could feel the emptiness, the cold
and the darkness sweeping back — and with them came the urge
to hurt, to crush and maim, to make this being hate me before
he died.

He must have made some sort of signal to those outside the
room. From somewhere came the high, unbearable whine, the

ALONE

79

rigid paralysis gripped me again. My eyes were fixed on the
vibrating metal diaphragm on what would have been the thorax
of the Martian if he had been an insect.

“ We have never been an emotional people,” said the metallic
voice. “ Even before we became the hybrids that we are now
— half organic matter, half machine — we were never emotional.
But we know what a great part emotion plays in your lives. We
have read your books, listened to your music. We have observed
you. We have even devised instruments to measure emotional
force — and I can assure you that you, on your world, live in an
intense field of such force that is almost as essential to you as
the air you breathe.”

He asked abruptly, “ Do you want to live ? ”

“ No,” I said.

“ Then do you wish to atone for the . . . murder that you
committed ? ”

“ Yes,” I said. “ Kill me. Get it over with.”

“ But you must atone by living. You must be our messenger
to Earth. You must tell your people what happens when they
lift out and away from the emotional vibrations of their mother
world. And you must tell them, too, that should any ships by
some miracle reach our world with their crews still living, still
more or less sane, then they will be dealt with ruthlessly. We
have weapons that would make your fission bombs look like a
child’s toys. We have ships that could devastate your cities,
your Space Stations and your Lunar Colony as soon as any ship
of yours landed on Mars.

“ Tell your people that.”

“ But how am I to get back ? ” I asked. “ I’ll never survive
the journey.”

“ You will,” he told me.

I did, and so I am sitting here ten miles to the north of Coper-
nicus, watching you gentlemen in your pressurised tractors
edging closer to me. I warn you, Stop ! I have weapons —
weapons I did not have when I left Earth — or, come to that,
when I left Mars. I’m sorry that I’ve burned your motors out.

Sorry . . . Sorry . . . What is sorry ? A figure of speech.

I can watch your tractors, and at the same time I can watch
Earth, the green and gold globe hanging in the black sky. But
it means nothing to me. Nothing at all.

8o

NEW WORLDS

No, gentlemen, I did not go mad on the voyage back from
Mars. My story is not, as you suggest, mere raving. Pick up
your binoculars. Look at me, where the venturi should be.
You don’t see any venturi, do you ? Neither did you see any
exhaust flame when I dropped down to the Moon from Space.
You will not suggest, surely, that alone on Mars, with no material,
no tools, no equipment I remodelled my ship and built a closed
cycle reactor ? You would like the secret of that, wouldn’t you ?
You would like to know how to maintain the hard vacuum abaft
the firing chamber. But the secret is not mine to give away.

I promised that I would warn you. But I did not promise
that I would let you operate on me, that I would let you restore
my brain to the perfectly good body that is sleeping in the deep
freeze chamber that the Martians installed for me. My brain
was built into Emmie — EMNIAC, the Electro Magnetic Inte-
grator and Calculator — and I’m part of Emmie now, and she’s
part of me. (You know, she had quite a definite personality . . .
It still lives, after an odd fashion . . .) I’m a hybrid now, as
the Martians are. I’m one of you no longer. (Neither am I
one of them).

I’m immortal, they told me — or near immortal. There’s plenty
of life in my pile, and I should be able to replenish the fissionable
material before it dies — although by that time I should have
figured out a way of drawing my energy direct from the radiation
that floods all Space.

I’m immortal, and my body, thanks to its closed cycle reactor,
has practically unlimited range. I’ll visit the Centaurian systems
first, I think — just to try out my new wings. Then I’ll make for
the Coal Sack.

But before I go there’s one thing I want from you. You’ll
not refuse me, I know. (You’d better not. And you’d better
cancel that order to Earth asking for a couple of rocket loads of
military — I can listen on more than one wavelength, you know).
There’s one thing I want — that big Electro Magnetic Computer,
the one you call Mickie, in Base H.Q.

I’m still just a little lonely, and I’d like an occasional game
of chess.

Bertram Chandler

CONTRA-TERRENE MATTER

81

In the December issue of NewWorlds John Newman discussed
the possibilities of contra-terrene matter in an article entitled
“ Energy." In collaboration with his colleague Kenneth Bulmer
he now brings you up to date with the latest information con-
cerning this fascinating subject.

I

CONTRA-TERRENE MATTER

By Kenneth Johns

The possibility of contra-terrene atoms existing in the Universe
we know has intrigued scientists and writers for about twenty-
five years. For contra-terrene matter, material formed from
atoms with reversed electrical charges, sometimes known as
C-T or seetee, may be the clue to an inexhaustible supply of
energy and a fuller understanding of the complex internal
structure of the atomic nuclei leading to a wider knowledge of
the Universe itself.

Ordinary atoms are composed of a heavy nucleus of protons
and neutrons held together by the binding force of mesons,
around which sufficient negative electrons form a cloud to
balance the central positive charges of the protons.

A quarter of a century ago Nobel prize-winner Professor Dirac
evolved an equation to explain the action of electrons solely
in terms of mathematics. Dirac was a brilliant physicist and
mathematician, but even he was surprised when he found that
there were two solutions to his equation, solutions for both
negative and positive electrons. At that time no positive electrons

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NEW WORLDS

were known ; but within two years positrons exactly fulfilling
his predictions were discovered at the California Institute of
Technology. In the study of cosmic rays it was found that an
electron and a positron were created as a pair by the energy of
cosmic rays.

By slightly altering his equation, Dirac found that it described
the properties of protons, and again there were two possible
solutions. The conception of the anti-proton was born.

By 1934 Dirac himself had postulated contra-terrene matter
existing elsewhere — matter where positrons form a cloud around
a nucleus containing negative antiprotons. This conclusion was
reached in spite of the fact that there was no practical evidence
of anti-protons existing anywhere in the Universe, although an
intensive search was instigated for the missing particle.

Dirac’s equation gave a clear picture of what this alien nucleon
should be : with a mass of 1.6724 x io -24 grams, an electrical
charge of — 4.8028 x io -10 electrostatic units and extremely
stable until it comes into contact with ordinary matter. An
anti-proton and a proton should react in a microscopic by
inconceivable violent explosion as the total mass of each is con-
verted into raw primeval energy — just as positrons and electrons
react.

Contra-terrene matter built of this hypothetical particle
should also be as viciously reactive to all normal matter, and
this seems as good a reason as any for its non-existence on
Earth. One suggestion made was that the asteroid belt was
created when a contra-terrene type intruder collided with the
planet that once orbited between Mars and Jupiter. For any
contra-terrene atoms would explode on contact with any normal
matter. The concept of almost the whole of planetary masses
being converted into pure energy is indeed a subject worthy of
science fiction.

The search for the anti-proton was on ; but the possibility
of creating them in pre-World War II cyclotrons was remote,
as these early atom-smashers could accelerate particles to an
energy of only a few million electron volts, whilst theory stated
that at least 6,000 million electron volts (6 Bevs) was needed, a
figure beyond the wildest dreams of physicists a quarter of a
century ago. Talking wisely of ‘ Dirac Holes,’ experimenters
turned to cosmic rays, the natural high-energy particles smashing
into the Earth’s atmosphere with more energy than even present-
day man-made machines can supply.

CONTRA-TERRENE MATTER

83

During the next twenty years photographic plates sent up to
trap cosmic rays were carefully examined for evidence of anti-
protons, whilst the possibility of contra-terrene meteors striking
the atmosphere was seriously considered. Several times physi-
cists thought they had at last caught up with the elusive particle ;
but always there was insufficient evidence to satisfy the more
sceptical scientists. The obstacles were too great to be over-
come easily : the experiments could not be controlled : the
chance of an anti-proton being created was far too small high
above the Earth where observations are intermittent and almost
a practical impossibility.

Then came the spate of military and civil appropriations for
nuclear energy research and, when it came to new apparatus,
the physicists found that the sky was the limit. Spurred by
the megabuck, particle accelerators jumped in energy from the
few million volts of home-made units to fantastic projects
designed to operate at billion electron volt levels. The syn-
chroton now being built at Geneva has a 4,000 ton magnet with
a circumference of 2,000 feet, will need power sufficient to
supply a small town, and will accelerate particles to 25,000
million electron volts, 99.93% of the speed of light. The general
effect of the ‘ energy race ’ has been to double the power of
accelerators every three years.

New words were added to the languages spoken in the research
centres of the U.S.A., U.S.S.R., and Britain — Bevatrons, Syn-
chrotons, Cosmotrons, Cerenkov velocity selection counters,
quadruple focussing and alternating grading focussing, all had
their meanings. The demand was for more and more energy
with more intensive beams of particles. It became a matter of
national prestige to possess or be building another milestone in
the race to greater energies.

The Bevatron at the University of California at Berkeley was
designed with the creation of anti-protons in mind- — hence its
rated capacity of about 6 Bev. The 6 Bevs needed in the pro-
duction of the anti-proton are made up of 2 Bevs for the actual
creation of the mass of the proton-antiproton pair and the
remaining 4 Bevs are taken as kinetic energy by the energy-
carrying and created particles.

This experiment is, quite simply, a dream come true : for
this is the fabulous creation of matter from energy. The goal
of centuries of work and the subject of countless fables is now
an accepted scientific fact . . .

8 4

NEW WORLDS

The Bevatron at the University of California is made up of
four quarter circle magnets, each 50 feet in radius. Protons,
hydrogen nuclei, are injected by a small accelerator into the
evacuated doughnut between the magnetic poles and then circle
it 4 million times — a distance of about x 00,000 miles — gaining
speed and energy with every rotation. When they gain 6.2 Bevs
they are directed onto a copper target where collisions produce
a stream of high energy particles, including a few anti-protons.
But, for every anti-proton created there are 40,000 mesons,
particles intermediate in weight between protons and electrons.
Once the energy is available, the problem at once became that
of detecting tne 1 in 40,000 particle that could be the anti-
proton, the object of all this massive research.

Negative mesons and anti-protons were bent away from the
main spray by a magnetic field, focussed and the speed of the
particles measured to a thousand millionth of a second over a
distance of forty feet. Two scintillation counters with an auto-
matic timing circuit were used. The speed was vital, as anti-
protons are heavier than mesons and should travel more slowly.

This timing method was not very successful on its own.
Such a flood of mesons passed through the apparatus that
spurious timing effects were obtained solely by the coincidence
of mesons triggering both scintillators at the correct time.

Anti-protons, it was calculated, should emerge from the Beva-
tron at 78% of the speed of light. So a little known phenomenon,
the Ceremtov effect, was brought into use for the final proof.
When a spray of particles travelling at near the speed of light
in a vacuum passes through a medium such as glass in which
the speed of light is very much slower, a weird glow appears.
This is the visible result of shock waves of light produced by
the particles, and the angle at which they are emitted depends
on the speed of the particles.

A Cerenkov detector was set up and screened so that only
the light from particles travelling between 75 and 78% of the
speed of light was measured by photoelectric detectors. Finally,
another scintillation counter was placed at the end of the array
to ensure that no stray cosmic rays activated the counters. Thus,
a particle to be counted as an anti-proton had to have a negative
charge, the correct momentum (a function of speed and mass)
to be bent by the magnetic field, and a speed between 75 and
78% of the speed of light, to prove which it would have to pass
through each component of the set-up.

CONTRA-TERRENE MATTER

85

In October, 1955, the apparatus was complete and the starting
switches depressed. It was a significant moment in the history
of science. Then, to the watching and waiting physicists’
delight, a characteristic trace on the interlinked oscilloscope
showed that all their conditions had been met. On an average
of four times in the hour they were watching the betraying
trace of an anti-proton. When a total of sixty had been counted
they were convinced that the anti-proton was a reality and re-
leased the news to the world.

Then came the job of tracking and measuring the destruction
of anti-protons using photographic emulsions. The tracks and
stars of annihilation of at least another twenty particles from
the Bevatron were soon identified, having been slowed down by
repeated collisions in matter until they could react with an atomic
nucleus in a microscopic nuclear explosion.

Whilst protons spin in one direction in relation to their mag-
netic poles, anti-protons spin in the opposite direction. Too,
first measurements suggested that anti-protons are larger in
size but not in mass than protons and so seetee matter should
give a different spectrum when heated.

And then, in September, 1956, the University of California
announced the creation and discovery of the third anti-particle,
the anti-neutron. Whilst the neutron has no electrical charge
and so this cannot be reversed, it does have a magnetic field,
and it is the reversal of this in relation to its spin that distin-
guishes an anti-neutron from a neutron.

The anti-neutrons were produced from anti-protons, them-
selves created in the Berkeley Bevatron. The workers found
that not all of the anti-protons were immediately annihilated
when they were slowed down by ordinary matter. A few of
them passed close enough to ordinary protons for their electrical
charges to neutralise one another with the formation of a neutron,
from a proton, and an anti-neutron, from an anti-proton.

The presence of the anti-neutrons in the beam from the Beva-
tron was proved by first screening out all the remaining anti-
protons and then analysing the flashes of light as the remaining
particles collided with matter. Occasional 2 Bev flashes, twenty
times as strong as the flashes from ordinary neutrons, signalled
the mutual destruction of an anti-neutron and a neutron.

This latest proof of the existence of anti-protons and anti-
neutrons has reopened the old question of contra-terrene matter
and has given rise to a number of fresh speculations about the

86

NEW WORLDS

symmetry of the Universe. All the main particles of physics
now have an equal and opposite counterpart — both appearing
at the moment of creation as a pair.

Why have we no evidence that contra-terrene matter is wide-
spread in the Universe ? We know that anti-matter cannot
exist on Earth ; but could it be common elsewhere ? Could
whole stars and galaxies be seetee ? Professor Frisch believes
this is possible and that the light from anti-stars would be no
different from light from normal stars. In fact ‘ normal ’ may
be a highly questionable label, especially if we encountered a
race of people with human-type bodies, down to io decimal
places, whose bodies were composed of contra-terrene matter.
They would be ‘ alien ’ with a vengeance ; but we could not
say that we were normal and they were not.

If there are many seetee galaxies we would expect to see a
few of them in spectacular collision with our-type galaxies. But
no such phenomenon is known. Galaxies have been seen col-
liding and with the main effects rising from clouds of inter-
stellar gas and dust we would expect to see brilliant astronomical
effects before the radiation pressure of the generated light
blasted the two apart. From the lack of evidence of seetee
matter in the Universe there can only be a small quantity —
certainly less than that of normal matter.

Why this is so is not at all clear. If all matter was created in
the beginning by a single gigantic explosion and conversion of
raw energy into atoms we would expect equal numbers of anti-
and normal-stars. The great density of matter at first would
enable many of the atoms to react together to reform energy
but does not explain why a preponderance of normal atoms
were left over to expand and create the Universe.

Similarly, the exponents of continuous creation of matter are
having an equally hard job explaining why only normal hydrogen
should be created evenly throughout all space.

Now, a Brookhaven physicist, Dr. Goldhaber, has come up
with an idea that sounds more like science fiction than pure
science. Basing his hypothesis, on the original explosion theory,
Goldhaber suggests that two universes were formed at the
moment of creation, thus preserving the symmetry of nature.
Naturally, one universe contains all the missing anti-particles
whilst the other is the one we know.

Goldhaber postulates that in the beginning there was a single
giant particle containing all the energy and mass of two universes

CONTRA-TERRENE MATTER

87

— he calls it the universon. This then split into a cosmon and
an anti-cosmon of opposite electrical charges and the two were
thrust apart by the released energy. It is not clear just where
they were pushed apart to, in space, time or other dimension.
• The cosmon decayed to form our Universe whilst the anti-
cosmon may have decayed in turn to form an anti-universe —
somewhere.

Dr. Goldhaber admits there is no known method of checking
his hypothesis and there is no evidence in favour of it. But,
with the balance of creation in mind, lending its hidden support
there is also nothing to disprove the theory.

And so, the place and nature of contra-terrene matter is still
unknown, and will probably remain so until astronomers pick
out a strange pattern in a stellar spectrum, or witness violent
reactions out of proportion when two glaxies collide, or until
a high-C ship cruises into a new stellar system, sends down a
probe rocket — to see it vanish on first contact in an explosion
comparable only to that of an H-bomb.

Only one thing we can be sure of — contra-terrene matter
exists.

Kenneth Johns

DON’T READ THIS~~

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science fiction published in hard covers. Since it
seems you must read this, don’t whatever you do
send us your name and address on a postcard. If
you do this foolish thing, we shall send you our free
catalogue. We warn you for the last time that you
will be unable to resist the titles listed and des-
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■ 46, St. Augustine’s Avenue , London, W . 5 .-

NEW WORLDS

GUESS

Mr. High is a writer better known in contemporary magazines,
this being his first appearance in NewWorlds, but his advent
herewith is nonetheless welcome, bringing with it yet another
fresh approach to a popular theme.

WHO ?

By Philip L High

Years ago there would have been cheering thousands,
batteries of three dimensional telecameras, reporters . . . the
President on a platform garlanded with flags, ready to make
a welcoming and stirring speech — years ago.

Today, star ships no longer land on Earth. They must
return, almost furtively, by a pre-determined route to an
artificial satellite circling Pluto. Here there are landing
cradles, repair shops, stores, fuel and — the highly trained
officers of security.

Galland was first out of the ship. A thin tall man with
deep lines each side of his mouth and a tracery of wrinkles
about his eyes. He was thirty-four but looked nearer fifty. He
nodded briefly to the reception committee but did not speak.

A thin, blank-faced Lieutenant stepped forward and thrust
a disrupter against Galland’s chest. “ Up and open,” he said,
curtly.

GUESS WHO? 89

Galland raised his arms and opened both hands at the same
time to show that they were empty.

The Lieutenant nodded briefly. “Medical check to your
left, Captain.”

Galland walked as directed and two wooden-faced men fell
into step behind him. They were Combat Technicians but
were known to the Security experts as Psych’ Fighters or
Reflex Killers. They had been genetically bred and hypno-
trained for one purpose — as killing machines; only they were
faster than machines. They could draw and fire a weapon
with such incredible speed that a man with a weapon drawn
and pointed would be dead before he could press the firing
stud.

Galland knew this. He knew that the slightest hesitation
on his part, the merest hint of abnormality, would bring a
splash of energy from one of those weapons that would spat-
ter the charred fragments, of what was left of him, all over
the wall.

Leggett was next out of the ship, unshaven as usual, low
forehead crinkled worriedly, an uncertain grin about his
mouth.

Next came Benon, little and dapper, showing very white
teeth in a sallow face.

Lastly, the lanky, red haired Castle who looked as if he had
got into the scene by accident.

The door marked “ Medical Division ” slid shut behind
them and examination, stage one, began. There would be
blood tests, exploratory incisions, retina and respiration
checks. Cardiac charts would be drawn up and compared
with previous charts, cellular tests. The man who had first
stepped from the ship might be Captain Galland, on the other
hand . . . Security never took chances, because once some-
thing had stepped out of a Survey Ship that looked like its
Captain.

The Scour Squad went to work on the vessel. They fried
it, baked it, subjected it to hard radiation and flooded it with
corrosive gases for long periods. Instruments checked for
radioactives and cosmic energy weapons. Security took no
chances that way either, not since eighty-five square miles of
Yorkshire had gushed skvwards in an eruption that made a
hydro-nuclear explosion look like a fire-cracker.

9 °

NEW WORLDS

The crew were passed from Medical to Psych’. The Psych’
people threw the book at them. They started with the drugs,
Hypnosine, Narcosite, Revopentathol and the rest. They
passed from those to psych-mechanics, contortion techniques,
shock ejaculators, mentagraphs and lobo-exciters. They didn’t
find anything but they might have done. There might have
been parasitic control or an inscribed directive hooked to a
hypno-trigger designed to touch off a course of action at a
later date.

Clausen eased his bulk into the director’s chair and glanced
about him. He had sleepy but astute eyes, almost lost in a
heavy face which somehow wasn’t fat but muscle.

Bygrove, the Chief Psych, was shuffling his papers, Price, of
Med’, staring vacantly at nothing and Chief Technician
Harris, responsible for the Scour Squad, absently pulling his
ear.

“ Are we ready, gentlemen? ” Clausen didn’t wait for an
answer. “ Bygroves? ”

Bygroves cleared his throat. “ My department pronounces
the crew clear, no reservations.”

“ Clear,” said Price, without waiting to be asked.

“ Clear,” said Harris.

"So? ” Clausen’s voice was dry. "Take a look at this will
you? ” He snapped his fingers briefly at the small projection
room behind him. “ Okay, Tom, show them what we got.”

The lights went out, a screen lit and they were looking at a
three dimensional picture. There was a brief glimpse of six
planets circling a bright G.7. type sun then a cut to darkness.

“ Fifth planet,” said Clausen. “ Earth type, gravity, decimal
two plus, habitable.”

They were looking down on the planet from above, the
three-dimensional cameras making them feel as if they, them-
selves, were sliding above the delicate fern-like trees. They
saw mountains, rivers, shimmering lakes, two vast oceans,
polar ice caps.

“Jackpot! ” said Price, softly. “We haven’t come across
one like this in ten years.”

Clausen said : “ Yeah.” His tone of voice made the others
look at him sharply. He snapped his fingers again and the
scene cut abruptly. “ So far the poet, my friends. In brief,
the official standard cameras. As you know, we have secret
cameras embedded in the skin of the vessel near the nose.
The crew don’t know about these. They cut in automatically

GUESS WHO?

9 *

as soon as the motors are switched to surface survey.” Again
he snapped his fingers.

The same beginnings, tall fern-like trees, a silver river
winding away to a far sharp horizon . . .

“ Mother of God ! ” said Price in a startled voice. “ Who-
ever saw a city like that? ”

They watched.

“ I suppose those things like transparent man-size sea-horses
are the dominant life form,” said Bygrove. “ Biologically they
appear to — ” He stopped, suddenly. “ Say, why didn’t all
this show up on the standard cameras? ” His voice was sud-
denly fearful.

“Yeah,” said Clausen, drily. “Why?”

Bygrove was pale. “ Official cameras one thing, secret
cameras another, which means the crew — ”

Clausen straightened and said: “Precisely. We must face
facts, gentlemen. A member, or all the members, of that
crew have become, or are controlled by, aliens.”

“ Which? ” said Harris in a thin voice. “ If its only one of
the crew, which one? ”

“ Biologically, they’re the men they were, all of them,” said
Price. “ We don’t know of any life form which can make a
biologically accurate copy of another — do we? ” He looked
worriedly at Clausen.

“ Not until now,” said Clausen. “ Although I don’t think
that’s the explanation.”

“ Haye you an explanation? ” asked Bygroves, pointedly.
Clausen said : “ No,” heavily. “ All I know is that the
official cameras took a picture, one, or all the men on board,
extracted the micro-tapes, erased the original and re-imposed
a dummy run-over. All four are qualified survey camera men,
any of them could have done the job.”

“ Which one? ” said Harris.

“What do we do? ” asked Price. “We can’t eliminate the
lot in case they’re not all aliens.”

“ Might be a damn sight safer for all concerned if we did,”
said Harris. “ It won’t be the first time in history that a few
men have been sacrificed to save a race.”

Clausen made a gesture of denial. “ No,” he said, sharply.
“Don’t think I’m being squeamish about this thing, Harris.
Killing them now would be a short-sighted policy. Suppose
those things have put a tracer on the ship, suppose thev follow
up. We won’t even know what we’re fighting or what
measures to take. No, we must find, interrogate and dissect.”

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NEW WORLDS

“ How? ” said Harris with irritating directness.

“Everything — quarantine them together, watch, ask ques-
tions, get them rattled.”

“ Interrogation? ” Bygroves raised his eyebrows. “ I’ve had
the insides of their heads out — nothing.”

“ I know, I know.” Clausen made it sound soothing. “ We’ll
be watching and they’ll be watching each other. The strain
will tell, if one of them so closely resembles a human being
he’ll have the same weaknesses. Maybe he’ll crack, maybe the
pressure will bring out something that hypno-techniques and
probe drugs won’t.”

“Could be.” Bygroves sounded doubtful.

“ Suppose they’re all aliens,” suggested Harris. “ They
won’t go back and watch each other then.”

“They can’t help it. As I

ike just so much. We know
how much. If, on the other hand, they are controlled by
aliens then the vehicle will crack.”

“ You’re inferring some sort of telepathic control? ” asked
Bygroves.

“ Why not? Its happened before, I remember.”

Price nodded. “ Eight years ago, when Bronson was Chief,
kids’ stuff compared to this.”

Clausen lit a cigar with some care. “ I suggest we begin at
once. Shall we start with Captain Galland? ”

Galland stood to attention yet still appeared to be stooping
slightly.

“ Yes, gentlemen?” He looked from one to the other
nervously, conscious of a reflex killer standing behind him.

Clausen said : “ You, or other members of crew, are aliens.
Is it you? ”

Galland felt sweat gather in little beads above his eyebrows.
The voice had been so friendly and conversational that he
found himself stuttering. “ Good God — no — you made the
checks.”

“If you are, you don’t know it,” said Bygroves. “That
means you might be. I should think about that.”

“ One of the others might be,” said Price. “ They won’t
know either.”

“ Why did you fake the tapes? ” said Clausen. “ Someone
dubbed the tapes of the survey cameras. Why did you do it,

human they suffer the same

Galland? ”

GUESS WHO?

93

“ I didn’t. I never touched the damn tapes.” He shouted,
suddenly; “ What the hell are you picking on me for? ”

“ It might be you,” said Clausen reasonably. “ If it isn’t
you its one, or all, of the others. When you get back you’ll
have to watch them."

“It was a rotten dubbing job,” said Harris. “You could
have done it much better.”

“ I didn’t touch the tapes.”

“ When we had the Altair case,” said Clausen, “ we put the
Captain in a sonic cubicle. The face lost shape and it wasn’t
the Captain anymore. It’s terrifyingly painful and you can’t go
mad. You pray for madness but it doesn’t come. You
wouldn’t like that to happen to you would you. Captain?
Especially if you’re not alien — .”

“ Leggett next, I think,” said Clausen when the Captain had
been escorted from the room. “ We’ll give the lot the same
treatment, then we’ll watch.”

“ Any impetus? ” enquired Price.

“ Oh yes, we’ll let them know they’re being watched. We’ll
talk to them periodically, a reminder of their position.”

“ I don’t like it,” said Bygroves. “ White mice in a cage,
periodically prodded, but they’re not white mice, they’re
men.”

Harris scowled at him. “ Care to prove it? ”

Bygroves flushed slightly but ignored the remark. “They
can assess the implications and know their lives are hanging
on a thread. They’ll hate each other, they’ll hate us and it
could drive them mad. It might drive them mad before we
find out what we want to know.”

“ Can you suggest anything better? ” asked Clausen.
Bygroves shrugged angrily. “ No, it’s just the principle — .”
He relapsed into moody silence.

“ I don’t like it either,” said Price. “ Further, I’m scared.
There’s something about this business I don’t like. I’ve got
a strange feeling we could clear all this up by changing our
approach. Every life form we meet we treat as an enemy,
slap down first and make signs of peace afterwards. I’ve a
strong feeling that we can go a lot further, more safely, if we
gave other life forms a chance to prove themselves first.”
“The Union will love that one,” said Harris, sarcastically.
“ They’ll throw it, and you, straight on the junk pile.”

“ All right, but I think I’m right. I think that alien is try-
ing to tell us something mentally. I think we could save our-

94

NEW WORLDS

selves, and humanity, an awful lot of trouble if we took some
notice.”

“ I agree. I feel it too.” Bygroves’ voice was determined.

“We all feel it.” Clausen looked from one to the other
frowning. “ The point is, it’s not our business. You know
the regulations as well as I do. Now let’s get on with the
business in hand.”

Price rose. “ As you wish, go by the book. It’s your head
as well as ours.”

The four men were confined to a large comfortable room.
There was every convenience and no privacy, every luxury
and no pleasures. They knew they were being watched ana
they watched each other.

At unpredictable periods the speaker boomed at them.
“ Which of you are aliens. It might be the one beside you —
think. Think back, who did you see touching the cameras? ”

The voice shouting. “Wake up there, wake up. Why did
you dub the tapes, declare yourself.” And then softly. “ You
could go back to your home world, we have nothing against
you. We just wish to protect ourselves, you could save your-
self all this.”

The alarm buzzer jerked Price from sleep two Earth periods
later. He did not stop to thrust the wall bed back into its
cubicle and reached the observation room still struggling into
his clothes. “ What’s the trouble? ”

Bygroves, white faced, pointed to the screen.

Price looked and felt himself go cold. Benon lay sprawled
On the floor and Captain Galland was still bending over him
in the attitude of one eager to continue the attack.

“ It all happened so suddenly.” Bygroves’ voice was harsh
with tension. “ He just leapt without warning. Benon was
talking — about women, as usual — Galland chopped him on
the side of the neck with the edge of his hand. Benon was
down before I could throw the immobiliser switch.”

Price was already Struggling into a protective suit. He
hoped it would protect him. It was supposed to stop anything
but he was doubtful. No one knew just what they were
fighting.

Clausen joined them as Price was completing his examina-
tion.

“ Is he dead? ”

“ Very dead,” said Price straightening. He looked at the
other prisoners, still rigid from the immobiliser and an old

GUESS WHO?

95

jingle came into his mind. Ten little nigger boys — four little

E risoners. He had the frightened feeling that, in some way,
e was being horribly prophetic. Benon was only the first.

“ Better give Galland a release shot and have him in,” said
Clausen. “ Check his psycho-pattern first, Bygroves, make
sure there’s no insanity ripples on the psycho-graph.”
Captain Galland was quite sane. “ I killed him because he
was the alien,” he said simply. “ I remembered he spent a
lot of time by the cameras and I watched him. While he was
talking I saw him change. His eyes altered and his face — .”
“ It didn’t occur to you to press the alarm buzzer? ”
Galland said stiffly : “ I should never have made it. He saw
I had him spotted. There was something pretty deadly there,
something too powerful and alien to describe. He could have
killed me and said I was the alien.”

“ Or you could have killed him, as you did, and said he
was,” said Clausen softly.

Galland’s mouth fell slowly open. “You don’t think — ”

“ It is of no consequence what I think. The point is, it
could be true. Did you see Benon’s face change. Bygroves? ”
“ No.” Bygroves shook his head. “ I couldn’t if it had. The
man had his back to the vision screen when Galland killed
him.”

Four hours later an attendant medic pressed the immobi-
liser switch again. Leggett was doing his best to strangle
Galland.

Leggett was sane too. “ He killed Benon because Benon
had him spotted. He knew I’d spotted him too. Something
happened to him, some kind of force seemed to be flowing
out at me. I knew I had to get him before he got me.”

“ Or before he spotted you and notified us,” suggested
Bygroves in a dry voice.

Leggett said, wearily : “ I look dumb but I’m not. I know
I’m right but can’t prove it. You don’t know either way, do
you? ”

“ Get him out of here before I strangle him myself,” said
Harris, tightly.

When he had gone, Harris said: “We’re getting nowhere,
fast. What do we do when they’ve killed each other off? Sit
around watching an empty room? ”

Clausen smiled. “ Ever heard of diversionary attacks? ”
Bygroves looked at him sharply. “You’re working on an
angle, as usual. One day something will outsmart you.”

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NEW WORLDS

Clausen stretched and rubbed his hand across his chin
wearily. “ One day something will outsmart the whole Union.
We’ll stick our noses into a system which will recognise us for
what we are — predatory upstarts, and that will be it.”

The crisis occurred four periods later. Alarm buzzers
sounded all over the satellite and red lights pin-pointed the
danger area.

The emergency squad was already standing by when
Clausen arrived but it was not an attack, at least, not from
outside.

There was an unrecognisable cinder in the middle of store-
room seven, charred fragments spattered the walls and there
was the stench of burned and disrupted flesh. A blank-faced
reflex killer was calmly cleaning and reassembling his dis-
ruptor.

‘ What happened? ” Clausen’s voice was a bark.

The man did not turn his attention from his weapon. “I
was doing routine rounds, Sir, when I came in there was a
thing in here. It wasn’t a man. I don’t know what it was.
I shot it.”

Clausen swore under his breath. Damn trigger-happy
moron, now they’d never know what it was. His face paled
suddenly and he flicked the communicator switch. “ Atten-
tion, attention all section officers. All departments check your
personnel, on, or off duty. Report in order to my office in ten
minutes.” He snapped down the switch and jerked his head
at the killer. “ You’d better come with me.”

The reports were prompt, concise and precisely what
Clausen had feared. R.T. Comber, maintenance, 2nd Class,
could not be found. He had gone to store-room seven for a
supply of air pump gaskets and had not returned.

Clausen thought of the charred cinder on the floor and the
mess on the walls. “ What’s your name? ” he barked.

“ Pean, Sir. Walter H. Combat Technician, First Class.”

Clausen leaned forward. “ Pean, you’ve just killed a man.
You blasted him to pieces as he went about his normal duties,
why? ”

“ I, Sir? ” The blank face did not change. “ There was no
man, Sir, there was a thing. I shot it, I told you.”

Clausen’s heavy knuckles whitened as he clenched his hands
but his voice was calm. “ You are mistaken, Pean, the thing
you saw was a member of the maintenance staff. You made
a mistake, some trick of the light, perhaps.”

GUESS WHO?

97

“I saw it clearly, Sir. It looked like a kind of sea horse,
semi-transparent, so I shot it. If it had been a man dressed
up I should have done the same. I can’t help it, it’s my con-
ditioning. You understand. Sir, when I see a thing that’s not
human, I kill it, I can’t help it.”

“All right, all right.” Clausen dismissed him irritably.
The psychs were getting too clever. When you got a thinking
weapon that didn’t have to think before it acted there was a
paradox somewhere. The fastest killing machine ever created
and you couldn’t control it. It looked like man had out-
smarted himself.

Bygroves came in. He looked haggard and his hands
trembled. “ It’s loose in the satellite now, isn’t it.” It was a
statement, not a question.

Clausen nodded without speaking.

“ Any ideas? ” Bygroves’ fingers drummed nervously on
the edge of the desk.

“ Plenty.” Clausen heaved his bulk out of the swivel chair.
“ It tipped its hand — if it has hands. It carried this elimina-
tion technique just one degree too far. The creatures are in
advance of us technically but I think I have their measure.”

Bygroves sank into the chair Clausen had just vacated,
some colour had returned to his face and there was hope in
his eyes. “ How long before? ”

“ I hope to have enough of it left for the labs to work on
inside five hours.” Clausen sat on the edge of the desk. “ We
fell down on ship clearance. The thing walked out of the
ship behind one of the crew — Galland, Leggett, any one of
them. It was already semi-transparent, a two-cent device
could have completed the job and reduced it to complete
invisibility.”

“ What about the detectors? ” Bygroves fumbled nervously
for a cigarette.

“That’s where we fell down. They’ve always worked,
haven’t been revised for years. A thing that could build a
city like that must have laughed its head off. It could bend
light round itself, bending the detector rays without breaking
the circuits and ringing the alarms must have been kid’s
stuff. It walked off the ship right in front of us like follow-
my-leadet .”

“ I still don’t see how it began.” Bygroves put the cigarette
in his mouth and forgot to light it.

98

NEW WORLDS

“ These things have some sort of hypnotic technique,” said
Clausen. “ The crew of the survey ship saw what those things
wanted them to see, a stage ten planet with excellent colonisa-
tion possibilities. They landed and the thing got on board.
Then it either dubbed the camera tapes itself or influenced
one of the crew to do it.”

“ Then why should they try and kill each other? ”

“It’s loose in the ship, isn’t it? It imposed an hypnotic
picture on Galland’s mind and when Galland looked at Benos
he saw an alien, simple. Pean, the reflex killer, went down to
store-room seven and saw Comber. The alien was around, it
got into Pean’s mind and, instead of seeing Comber, he, too,
saw an alien. Clever, isn’t it? We wipe each other out while
the alien stooges around beaming directives from an arm-
chair.”

“We could have spared ourselves all this and saved some
lives. We do everything the hard way.” Bygroves finally li r
the cigarette.

“ Do you think there’d be a Union if we’d gone out to the
stars making peace signs? You hit first, then dictate peace
terms as the boss, it’s the only way if you want to survive.”

“ How do you know when you’ve never tried? ”

“ Oh, for God’s sake ! ” Clausen shrugged irritably. “ It
works, doesn’t it? We’ve got ourselves an Empire, that’s proof
enough in hard fact.”

“ If you say so.” Bygroves sounded weary. “ What do yot.
intend to do about the present situation? ”

Clausen lit a cigar. “ Years ago we ran into a virulent
infectious fungus. It was stopped by letting the air out of
the satellite. There is a special button I can press for just
such an emergency, self-sealing bulkheads won’t function and
compensators quit. The men have enough emergency drill,
they’ll rush for survival suits. Our alien friend is too big to
wear one of ours, too big to have carried one of its own out of
the survey ship. When the air goes out of the satellite, this
thing will be caught with its pants down.”

Bygroves nodded. “ Smart. All this interrogation business
was a blind then? ”

“ Yes.”

By groves blew a smoke ring. “You’re smart, aren’t you?
Perhaps the smartest man Security’s ever had out here, the
smartest and the most ruthless. It could have worked.”

“ What do you mean? ” Clausen frowned at him.

GUESS WHO?

99

“ If this creature is tops on hypno-techniques, it can get into
your mind and read it, know what you’re going to do in
advance.”

“ I’ve got to take a chance on that.”

“ I’m afraid that’s one thing you’re not going to do.” Sud-
denly there was a thick barrelled splash gun in Bygroves’
hand. “ You were right, Clausen, so damn right in every-
thing. You’re too smart for your own good. I shall tell the
others I saw you change, that you were the alien so I shot you.
It’s as simple as that. Without you an understanding may be
reached.”

“But you’re not the alien, you can’t be.” Clausen’s voice
was hoarse.

“Can’t I? This hypnotic business is very, very encom-
passing.”

With dull eyes Clausen saw Bygroves’ finger depress the
firing stud.

Philip E. Hind

THE “SOLASCOPE”

GIANT
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** SOLASCOPE, ” Dept. A, 44 London Road, Kingston, Surrey

100

NEW WORLDS

THE LIGHTS

During recent years we have published a number of intriguing
concepts regarding the impact of spaceflight upon the human
being — Alan Guthrie’s two stories, “Samson ” and “No Space
For Me ” published last year assumed that it would be physically
impossible for Man to venture into space. James White extra-
polates the theme herewith in an even more fascinating manner.

By James White

Illustrated by EDDIE

Seen through the direct vision port the receding planet
Mars was a completely uninteresting object — a pink circle
roughly the size of a golf ball held at arm’s length with
blurred, uneven edges, the brighter stars in the background
showing as faint smudges of grey on the surrounding black-
ness. The Glory of Space! Captain Miller thought sardonic-
ally, and made a face.

To show their faith in the Starfire’s Captain the powers-
that-be had allowed her to have one small view-port — two
square feet of transparent plastic — in her private cabin. But
their faith must be something less than complete, however,
because the material was about as transparent as cut glass.
Carefully, so as not to send her hammock into oscillation, the
Captain turned her back upon Mars, stretched and tried to
go to sleep.

But it was not to be. The intercom beside her burst sud-
denly into a furious babble of speech :

“He’s breaking my engine! He’s breaking it! Stop him.
he’s breaking my — ”

“ I’m not breaking it — ”

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS 101

“He is! He is! He’s smashing the whole — ”

“ Shut up ! I won’t hurt your silly old engine. Besides it’s
not really yours ...”

The Captain reached out and flipped over the “Transmit”
switch. With just the proper amount of reproof in her voice,
she said, “ Now boys, one at a time. Manners, remember,
and discipline.” She paused, then; “You first, Jimmy.”

It seemed that Chief Drive Engineer James Hollingsworth,
Ph.D. etc., etc., was having a row with the equally well-degreed
Christopher Barnsley over the engine. Captain Miller knew
that engine of old and had been expecting it to undergo its
periodic metamorphosis at the hands of her crew at any time
now. The outrage from the more conservative-minded indi-
viduals was also expected. But she was a good enough psycho-

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logist — an exceptionally good psychologist or she would not
be Captain of a spaceship — to know that there was no real
danger as yet, and so began the verbal pouring on of oil that
had become almost automatic with her. She ended by telling
Chris and Jimmy that she would be with them shortly. The
knowledge that they had caused her to cut her sleeping period
short for them should have a chastening effect, though the
truth was she could not sleep anyway.

As Captain Miller struggled into her uniform, the blurred,
pink orb of Mars stared in at her. She found herself staring
back, and thinking — with a peculiar mixture of irritation and
amusement — of their recent landing there.

The secrecy and almost mystic ritual surrounding the
touching down of a Star Line spaceship had become a joke
on the three worlds and five satellites served by that Com-
pany — one of those jokes which are funny, but which leave
a bad taste in the mouth and a doubt in the mind as to who
exactly the joke is on. For one thing, the ship’s personnel
never left the vessel anywhere but at home base — and then
only in screened cars. For another, the passengers were
loaded and disembarked while under sedation by medical
orderlies, with Company guards present to see that they did
not let their curiosity get the better of them by ducking into
restricted sections of the ship. Because of the necessity of
talking to Ground Control, arranging for food, fuel and the
like, the only fact generally known about Star Line ships was
that they possessed women Captains — voices could not be
completely disguised even over the RT.

It was this fact which had caused the rumours to grow, and
given birth to three songs, scores of allegedly humourous
verses and probably hundreds of stories all of an unprintable
nature. This was the cause of the Captain’s mixture of
emotions. It was laughable, if it was not for the fact that
sometimes she felt mad enough to spit.

When she thought of Traffic Control on Mars with their -
sly, “ Did you have a nice trip, Captain? ” she felt like open-
ing up on them with a couple of home truths about them-
selves. But she would not do any such thing, no matter hnw
much she felt like it. Not for some time, anyway.

Star Lines had a trade secret, and if it was to survive ana
grow against the competition of the larger Government subsi-
dised Companies, it was natural for this small independent
outfit to keep that secret until it was at least as strong as its

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS

103

competitors. After that their methods of training and ship
operation would be published, Captain Miller and her sister
Captains would become famous, and a lot of hyper-curious
and over-imaginative would-be poets would look awful silly.

Miller smoothed the wrinkles from her one-piece white
coverall, checked that her hair was clipped down securely at
the back of her neck, then kicked herself into the corridor
outside. The sight of its green and white striped floor, walls
and ceiling acted as always, as a sort of Pavlovian bell to her
mind.

1 he conquest of space became a fact when, while astronauts
all over the world were still trying vainly to produce a manned
satellite vehicle, the superbly efficient and economical Spencer-
Hoist Drive was discovered by two physicists who were not
even interested in astronomy. With it the inner planets were
only weeks away, the Moon merely a matter of hours. Oh
yes, Captain Miller thought bitterly, the conquest was certain
— if it had not been for the flaw in the mental equipment of
the would-be conquerors.

Quite simply, men could not stand Space.

But spaceflight had become a matter of national prestige
as well as of population pressure. The colonisation of the
inner planets became a crusade which was fought with the
determination and heroism which had characterised the wars
of recent history. And it became expensive not because of
the power needed to send a ship from planet to planet but
because of the fantastic lengths some Governments went to
protect or cushion their crews against the shock of Space.

Green and white zebra stripes. Miller thought: corridor to
be entered only by the Captain. A black and white diamond
pattern on a corridor, storage compartment or dormitory
meant that ground stalf — medical orderlies, maintenance men
and cargo handlers together with their respective guards —
only were allowed there. A red and white check motif was
used throughout the crew’s quarters, and for the duration of
the voyage they staved happilv within their three-dimensional
draughts board with no inclination whatever to leave it. The
conditioning which made them behave thus was most subtle;
a crew-man was not verbally forbidden to go to the green-
white or black-white sections. But if Captain Miller was to
ask one of her officers to come to her cabin or to meet her
outside the passenger dormitory, that man would find some
weird and wonderful excuses for not going, and if forced he
would become a very sick man rather than go.

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NEW WORLDS

The crew were conditioned in other ways, too, of course,
the exact nature of that conditioning being the trade secret.

Only Captain Miller could go anywhere she pleased on the
ship. . She alone was not conditioned. At least, she was fairly
certain that she was not. You never could tell.

She passed from stripes into the black and white diamonds
of the passenger section, then paused. Soft bumping and
scraping noises were coming from the dormitory where Billy
was laying out the food containers preparatory to administer-
ing the shots which would wake the passengers up for their
next meal. Billy, as Chief Steward, Cook and Medical Officer,
was the only member of the crew allowed in the passenger
section, and of course he was never present when its occupants
were conscious. His job was to set up the food and leave
before his charges woke up, then return to clear away again
when the sedatives contained in the food had done their
work. He also saw to it that body functions continued in a
healthy manner during these awake periods by the adminis-
tration of other, cruder types of drugs. He was a Doctor, of
course, and a good one, but Miller prayed continually that
nobody on board would take seriously ill. The sense of
medical responsibility tended to become lost on a ship like
the Starfire.

There was really no reason for her to check the passengers
again. It would only make Billy flustered and hold him
back, and she would not do that merely to satisfy the vague
uneasiness she had felt since the discovery that Danny had
been assigned to her ship. She had to call him Danny and
treat him like any of the others despite the relationship
existing between them on Earth, but it was a strain. Miller
shrugged angrily and continued on her way.

When they got back, Miller vowed to herself, somebody
was going to suffer for that little mix-up. Danny normally
was Second Officer of Starfiame, but some idotic personnel
man had got his flames and fires confused so that he had been
sent aboard the sister ship Starfire by mist ke. if Captain
Miller slipped off the psychological tight-rope which that
error had caused her to walk, it could quite easily prove fatal.

It was considered extremely unwise for a Captain to have
even a distant relative in her crew, and to have had a prior
emotional attachment to a crew-member was simply asking
for it. If she had only discovered the mistake early enough
to rectify it . . .

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS

105

There was a peculiar and highly-artificial balance between
the Captain and crew of the Starfire. The men had been so
conditioned that they naturally gave her all their trust,
loyalty, and a love that amounted almost to worship. On her
side she had to love them in return, but with the utmost
impartiality, and guide them and the ship to safety by seeing
to it that that balance was preserved. But the slightest sign
of favouritism would have been fatal to that delicate structure,
and she suspected that she was leaning over backwards in not
showing favourites where Danny was concerned. That could
be dangerous, too.

Captain Miller swore helplessly under her breath. They
were babies, just babies, despite their degrees and vast
specialised knowledge. She could not feel annoyed with them
for long. Besides, if they had not been as little children they
would not have been here in the first place.

A bulkhead door with a lock on it lead to the Crew and
Control section of the ship. She fastened it behind her, then
kicked out towards the open door of The Mess which was
about fifteen yards along the corridor. At once she saw that
one of the crew was lying in wait for her. She sighed

A knee, shoulder and the top of a head showed around the
side of a tool locker Had a little more been visible Miller
would have known who the man was. However, as he was
trying to hide she would play along by pretending not to see
him — she would find out who it was soon enough.

As she drifted gently past the locker a long familiar voice
said “Boo! ” loudly. Simultaneously a heavy body collided
with hers and a pair of massive arms wrapped tnemselves
around her waist. Miller’s perfectly-judged dive along the
corridor ended in a chaos of arms and legs against a section of
wall-netting, but luckily only her dignity was bruised. She
steadied herself with the aid of the net and used the knuckles
of her other hand to rap sharply on the ambusher’s forehead.

“Danny! Beha've yourself! ”

There must have been more irritation in her tone than she
had meant to show. The wide, exuberant grin on Danny’s
face was abruptly wiped away and for a moment she thought
that he would burst into tears. She said hastily, “There,
there. I’m not angry at you, Danny. It’s just . . . Well,
you startled me.”

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NEW WORLDS

Danny’s expression became suddenly contrite. “ I’m awful
sorry,” he mumbled, then half fearfully, “I ... I thought
maybe you didn’t like me anymore ...”

Miller looked into those desperately pleading eyes, then
away quickly. This wasn’t fair, she thought wildly. The
strong, mature, well-integrated person that she knew so well
on Earth, and on whom she had depended so much, should
not be looking at her like this. It was tearing her apart. She
said roughly, “ Of course I like you, Danny. I love all of you
equally. You know that. But now I have to go to the Mess.
Are you coming? ”

Danny nodded vigorously and chortled, “ Yes. Oh, yes.
Chris and Jimmy say they’re gonna fight for who gets the
engine.”

That’s what they think, Miller thought grimly as she re-
sumed her interrupted journey. She had not realised that
the situation had become as serious as that.

Technically, the place where the four-man crew of the ship
spent their off-duty periods was called the Wardroom, but to
the personnel of the Starfire it was referred to simply as The
Mess. And not without reason. Miller thought as she halted
herself at the entrance and surveyed the interior once again.
Men, she reflected for at least the hundredth time, will be
boys!

The ceiling and walls were covered by a complicated lay-
out of narrow guage railway track. A model railway en-
thusiast afflicted with surrealistic nightmares might have
dreamed up something like this. Miller thought, with its signal
boxes, stations and bridges sticking out at all sorts of unlikely
angles, and with sections of track actually looping the loop in
some places to avoid outgrowths of the ship’s plumbing. But
the wildly three-dimensional nature of the layout was due
simply to its having to operate in the absence of gravitv. dur-
ing the weeks of free fall between the sustained high-accelera-
tion periods at the beginning and end of the vovage. Chris,
the Starfire’s Communications man. was kept constantly busy
re-magnetising the tiny metal sleepers so that the rolling stock
would stick to the track and not go drifting off into the middle
of the room.

But at the moment operations were at a standstill because
the reason for being of the whole thing, the locomotive with
the long-running clockwork motor, was being hugged pro-
tectively to Chris’s chest. The rolling stock stood neglected

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS

107

in the sidings while a bitter argument raged between Chris
and the Engineer Officer, Jimmy.

Miller took a deep breath, then said with mock severity,
“ What’s all this about breaking our engine? Speak up, now.”

“ I wasn’t going to break it,” Jimmy said with a withering
look at Chris. “ I just wanted to take out the motor for a
while ...” He went on to explain the idea he had for
fixing a propellor to the driving shaft and building a model
aeroplane around it He was fed up with Chris and the rail-
way and wanted something different.

Chris was protesting loudly long before he had finished
talking, and Danny was butting in with arguments about the
technical difficulties of making a model aeroplane fly realis-
tically in weightless conditions. Miller found her head begin-
ning to spin: her degrees were in applied psychology, not
advanced aerodynamics. But one fact emerged quite plainly,
Danny was about to side with Jimmy. In those circumstances
there was only one thing she could do.

“ I’d like to see Jimmy make an aeroplane,” she said in
cajoling tones, looking at Chris. “Wouldn’t you? And if
we don’t like it when it’s finished then he can put the motor
back again. You’ll see, you’ll have lots of fun with an aero-
plane.” Her eyes sought confirmation of this from the others,
trusting to their childish imaginations to come up with some-
thing which would divert Chris from his beloved trains. She
was not to be disappointed.

“Sure,” Danny burst out excitedly. “We could play Air
Raid.” He looked quickly at the Communications Officer.
“ You’ve got pieces of plastic insulation we could use as pea-
shooters. The man that hits it the most as it passes over — ”

“ We could darken the room,” Jimmy broke in, “ and every-
body could have a flash-lamp as well as a pea-shooter. Search-
lights! ”

Chris began to look interested.

Captain Miller knew that her Communications Officer
would not have gone against her wishes once she had made
them clear, but she did not want Chris sulking for the rest of
the trip. His voice was never heard over the ship’s sender,
of course, but he was necessary in case the Starfire’s electronic
gear went wrong.

But Chris was happy now. Miller left them all talking
excitedly together and unobtrusively moved into the Control-
room which adjoined The Mess where, theoretically, Danny

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NEW WORLDS

was supposed to be standing watch. She would have to remind
him gently of that, and he would probably say that he had
grown bored and had decided to go in and play with the
others. Miller smiled.

For roughly two in every ten hours she checked — without
understanding — the workings of her command. She never
expected anything to go wrong, naturally, especially during
the three weeks of free fall conditions when most of the ship’s
automatic devices were shut down. But if something did go
wrong then she could interrupt the play of one of her highly

S ' 'tied “boys” and make him play Spaceman until it was

It was a crazy way to operate a spaceship, Miller knew, but
not nearly as crazy as some of the methods currently in use.
Giant, unwieldy, inefficient ships which carried two — some-
times three — separate sets of operating personnel, and fre-
quently went through all of them on a round trip. Then there
were the more imaginative ones who designed their space-
ships to resemble the interior of an ocean-going atomic sub-
marine, complete with moving pictures of fish swimming out-
side its “ Port-holes.” But that required a one-G acceleration
at all times during the voyage, which was a ruinously waste-
ful and expensive level of operation for the Spencer-Hoist
Drive. But even then accidents occurred. Somebody was
sure to look through the wrong porthole at the wrong
time . . .

It had been Captain Miller’s grandfather who had first
brought back the proof that Space was not for Man — and
incidentally, who was primarily responsible as President of
Star Lines for later proving himself a liar. History had it that
Dr. Ernest J. Miller was awarded a place in the first S-H
powered space vessel because of his contributions to the field
of space medicine, but the truth was that he had made such
a nuisance of himself that they let him go simply to get him
out of their hair. He had infested the crew’s hair during the
trip in various ways until the ship actually sat down on the
Moon. It was then that Dr. Ernest J. Miller became an
historic figure. Of course, the official accounts called it scien-
tific caution, but with all due respect to her grandfather.
Captain Miller knew that he had been scared stiff of leaving
that ship.

The ship had made the approach and landing on instru-
ments, and because of a fault in the two-ply glass of the direct

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS

109

vision port — faulty insulation had caused it to frost over,
luckily — the crew were anxious to get their first look outside
the ship. Its Captain and another crew-man had suited up
and, watched enviously by the other two officers — but not
Dr. Miller — they had jumped the short distance to the Lunar
surface. They had looked all around them, talking excitedly
into their suit radios, then they had looked up.

The talking stopped. With arms akimbo and heads thrown
back they remained motionless. They stayed that way while
another officer became worried and went down to see what
had happened to them. He also became a motionless, up-
staring statue before he could report anything helpful to the
two still in the ship. It was two hours before the remaining
ship’s officer ventured down to them, watched by a jittery
Dr. Miller.

The Doctor had formulated an ingenious and utterly falla-
cious theory having to do with the effects of Lunar gravity on
the semi-circular canals of the ear and the sense of balance,
so that the officer had the strictest possible instructions for
rescuing his friends. On no account was he to look up or
move his head quickly in any direction. Acting on these
instructions he succeeded in returning his three companions
to the ship. But while in the airlock on his last trip, curiosity
got the better of him.

He had remained lucid for over half an hour, sufficient time
for him to tell the Doctor how to put the ship on long-range
automatic control — so that Earth Base could bring it home —
and for painting over the direct vision port in case the frosting
melted away.

Men could not take Space — or rather, they could not look
at it and stay sane. In space the Universe could be viewed in
3-D as it were; the distance between the heavenly bodies and
the awful masses of nothing at all were placed in their true
perspective. To say that a man felt insignificant at the sight
was a pitiful understatement, like -saying that he acquired a
severe inferiority complex. But this was not the worst that
happened to the man who looked into Space.

Psychologists likened it to the experience of being torn
prematurely from the mother’s womb, but with all the adult
faculties and sensitivity present during the trauma instead of
the undeveloped senses of an infant. Certainly the space-
man’s conscious mind recognised the fact that he was only
leaving this womb — the Earth — temporarily, but his sub-con-

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NEW WORLDS

scious most decidedly would not. Under the double shock of
“ space-gazing ” — which among other things paralysed the
time-sense — and the “ space-birth trauma,” the male human
mind collapsed.

The male mind ...

A young, mentally healthy and mature woman was not
bothered much by the sight of Space because, after the nature
of her kind she possessed a very practical, down-to-Earth
mind. Absence from that same Earth did not bother her
either because — to over-simplify an extremely complicated
subject— she was conscious of carrying her world inside her.
This was the discovery which the Star Line psychologists had
made, and it was only a step to the present highly successful
crew-system used in their ships.

For the duration of the two-way trip the Starfire’s crew were
hypnotically conditioned into believing that Captain Miller
was their mother. The conditioning — which lasted only dur-
ing the voyage— also gave them an emotional age of about
four years, though their technical skills remained unimpaired.
It also, in a most subtle way, caused them to think that they
were not really in a spaceship but in some complicated mock-
up in which they were training to become spacemen when
they grew up. Four was a very credulous age. They only
pretended for the Captain’s sake that they were in Space — she
was their mother after all and they liked to please her. In
this way the “ space-gazing ” danger was avoided, and Mother
Earth was replaced by the symbol of a loving Captain. The
system so far had worked perfectly.

Miller, of course, was the only normal person apart from
the doped-up passengers in the ship, or she was supposed to
be. Sometimes she wondered if there had not been a little
reciprocal conditioning used on her, the way she felt about
her crew at times, or was she simply suffering from an over-
developed maternal instinct?

Her thoughts were interrupted by Danny entering the Con-
trol-room in search of a screwdriver suitable for dismantling
toy locomotives. As he left again the intercom buzzer
sounded on the Captain’s desk indicating a call from the
passenger section.

“ Yes, Billy? ” she said, switching to sound and vision.

“ Th-there’s a man who won’t go to sleep,” Billy stammered,
his eyes wide with excitement. “ And . . . and he’s trying to
get out! ” The combination cook, steward and medic swal-

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS

in

lowed, then added nervously, “ He heard me outside and tried
to talk to me.”

“ Did you answer him? ”

Billy shook his head hurriedly.

“That’s a good boy,” Miller said, then: “You can come
back to clear the dinner things in about an hour. He’ll be
asleep by that time.” She smiled reassuringly and switched
to the screen showing the interior of the passenger compart-
ment, her eyes sweeping it for an empty hammock.

Number 15, that was a man called Gordon. And he had
not eaten his dinner or he would not have been up and about.

“ Mr. Gordon ! ” she said sharply. “ Please return to your
hammock and eat. You are endangering the efficient opera-
tion of this ship. Behave yourself 1 ”

Gordon had his feet planted against the door of the passen-
ger dorm and was working at the handle. He gave a start,
then looking in the general direction of the concealed ’speaker
and vision pick-up, he said, “I just wanted to see a bit more
of the ship. No harm in that, is there? ”

He was a big, dark man, Miller saw, who could have been a
miner or an engineer if it had not been for that crafty look in
his eyes. She guessed that he was in the business end of the
Colony — the funny business end. Miller exhaled heavily
through her nose. She was becoming angry, which was un-
usual for her, and she felt angry at herself for being angry.
This trip was getting her down, Danny was getting her
down . . .

“ You are forbidden to leave the dormitory during the
voyage,” she said angrily. “ You know that, it is one of our
conditions of carriage. Kindly return to your hammock . . ”
“ Look,” said Gordon, a wheedling note creeping into his
voice, “I know there’s something in the food which puts us
under, that’s why I didn’t eat anything this time. I’m curious,
you see. Why not let me see round the ship, or even part of
it, and meet you. I wouldn’t cause any trouble — ”

“ The regulations are for your protection, not mine. I’m
sorry, Mr. Gordon.”

“ I’d keep quiet about it, Captain. Honest.” Gordon paused,
then went on quickly, “ I’m not a rich man, but I could pay
to have my curiosity satisfied.”

“ Please return to your place.”

Miller often had trouble with passengers asking questions
on these trips, but this was the first time one had tried to
bribe her. Seeing that Gordon was about to renew his argu-

112

NEW WORLDS

ments, she angrily broke contact with him. His image was
still fading from her view-screen as she pressed the button
on her desk which released Morpheum into the passenger
dorm.

She would wait five minutes for the sleeping gas to do its
work, then go down and tuck the recalcitrant Mr. Gordon
into his hammock. He would be hungry at the next waking
period, of course, but it jolly well served him right.

Eight minutes later she was at the entrance to the passenger
dormitory. The door was open and Gordon was missing.

Her first concern was for her boys. Gordon loose among
the crew could cause serious harm — she might have to re-
condition some of them, and that was a dangerous business
with the limited facilities aboard ship. A normal adult
tangling with a bunch of emotional four-year-olds . . . She
pushed the thought hastily out of her mind while she fumbled
for the nose filter which would protect her against any residual
Morpheum seeping through the entrance, then she stopped
abruptly.

Gordon, she realised now, must have had a similar nose
filter. But in common with all the other passengers he had
been searched carefully before embarking and again on the
ship. That meant the filter had been placed in the dormitory
beforehand for his use, which in turn meant that Mr. Gordon
had not merely been personally curious but was engaged on
a piece of well-planned espionage.

But all that was a job for the Star Line security section
when she got back. Now she had to find him before he ran
into one of the crew. Which way had he gone?

She felt rather than heard a slight shock from astern. It
could have been made by shoes striking the metal plating of
the ship. The crew always wore soft sandals. Miller headed
in the direction of the sound.

As Miller moved into the red and white checks of the crew
territory she was thinking that perhaps she could do a little
work on Gordon’s mind to keep him from blabbing about
anything he might have found out in his travels. She thought
she could do that without damaging him. She would have
to find him first, and gain his confidence . . .

Suddenly out of the corner of her eye she saw Danny
following her. As if she hadn’t troubles enough already!
She pretended not to see him, then sealed the next bulkhead
door she passed behind her. That would delay Danny for a

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS

ii3

few minutes anyway. If she could only get to Gordon quickly
enough before Danny arrived to complicate things . . .

Ten yards further on, she found Billy.

He was clinging to the wall-net with one hand while hold-
ing the side of his face with the other. He said tearfully,
“ He hit me. I — I tried to stop him, because you told us that
the lights outside the windows makes the passengers sick.
B-but he hit me.” The account ended on a wailing note.

“ Where did he go, Billy? ”

Billy pointed to a branching corridor behind him. Miller
mentally ran over the plan of the ship, then dived hurriedly
into it. The galley and certain sealed portions of the Drive
were there, also one of the ship’s life-capsule bays.

She actually saw Gordon as he slammed the air-tight seal
of the launching bay behind him. It took a few minutes then
for Miller to reach the spot herself and remove the opaque
shield covering the seal’s inspection window. When she did
so, Gordon was already slapping paint onto the transparent
canopy of the life-capsule. In a few minutes he would be
gone.

She knew what had been planned now. This Gordon
character was supposed to find out all he could about the ship,
then escape in a life-capsule. Each capsule mounted a small
reaction motor and fuel sufficient to take it a safe distance
away from an exploding or otherwise distressed mother ship,
together with a two-way radio. He would launch the capsule,
check the Starfire’s Earth-wards velocity which he shared by
use of his rocket motor, then await pick-up by the ship which
was undoubtedly hanging on Starfire’s tail just beyond detec-
tion range. After that, in due course, the Star Line Com-
pany would again become a minnow among sharks.

But she could stop him yet. If only he did not know too
much about spaceships.

“ Mr. Gordon,” she said crisply, switching on the mike to
the capsule compartment. She also activated sound and
vision recorders all over the ship, just in case there was an
accident and subsequent investigation by the authorities — she
had to play safe both for the Company and herself. “ Mr.
Gordon,” she repeated, “ Cease all movement at once. You
are in great danger. The mechanism of that capsule is
faulty ...”

While she was speaking Miller kept her face at the inspec-
tion window, but her hands were wrestling with the stiff

1 14

NEW WOKLDS

manual control of the air-tight door. Gordon had cut out
the servo-motor which normally operated it, but if she could
open it manually then the outer seal of the bay would not
open and the capsule could not leave the ship. But the fact
of her trying to open the inner seal would set oil all sorts of
warning indicators inside. If she could only keep Gordon’s
attention . . .

Gordon looked up startled at the window which he had
thought was solid metal, and at the voice issuing from the
’speaker above it.

“ Well, well,” he said mockingly. “ It was nice to have seen
you, Captain ...”

Suddenly his eyes slewed sideways and his face went white.
He had seen the warning lights blinking on the nearby bulk-
head and come to his own conclusions. “ Oh, no you don’t,”
he said thickly, and called Miller several extremely dirty
names. He began wriggling frantically into the life-capsule.

Miller took her eyes from the inspection window then and
bent to concentrate on turning the manual control. She
strained at it, red-faced from the wholly uncalled-for language
which had been used on her as much as from her exertions.

Abruptly the control locked fast and an indicator above it
blinked “ Outer Seal Open.” There was a whooshing noise
which diminished rapidly into silence. Through the inspec-
tion window Miller was in time to see the flare of the Life-
capsule’s motor receding in a long arc at full power. As it
curved out of sight she shook the locked control angrily and
felt an urgent desire to burst into tears.

But maybe things were not all that bad, she told herself
consolingly. True, Gordon had seen a little of the ship before
escaping, but what really had he found out beyond the fact
that Billy had a rather childish personality and that certain
sections of the Ship’s interior were colour-coded with garish
check and diamond patterns?

The answer was an awful lot.

If Gordon had not been himself a psychologist, then trained
psychologists would shortly be questioning him under drugs
which allowed total recall. In those circumstances a few facts
plus a little imagination could give the whole game away.

Her thoughts were dramatically interrupted by a crash
which sounded like the Crack of Hoorn, but with tinny over-
tones — she had never before heard anything like it. From
nearby came the suddenly frightened cries of Danny and

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS

ll 5

Billy. The ship had been holed, obviously, but Miller could
not hear the hissing sound which would have told of air
escaping in the vicinity. She called out reassuringly, “ Emer-
gency Drill, boys! Get into your spacesuits.”

A clause in Space Regulations stated that interplanetary
ships must carry sufficient spacesuits so that, should an emer-
gency arise in any part of the vessel, a crew-man trapped
therein could reach one and don it within two minutes. This
meant that there was a spacesuit to be found in every ten
yards of corridor and up to six in any compartment where
the Starfire’s crew were likely to gather, not counting the
dormitory supply. There was no shortage of suits, Miller
thought grimly as she struggled into the tight-fitting plastic
and sealed it all but for the face-plate. The trouble was that
her crew could not be trusted to use them properly, if at all.
She would have to check that first before she could start
thinking about whatever catastrophe it was which had over-
taken the ship.

It had not sounded like a meteorite, somehow.

Danny was talking to a scared-looking Billy when she came
up to them. He was saying scornfully, “ . . . And anybody
knows it’s not a real emergency. It’s a test. But if you start
being a sissy, shouting and crying that you want to get o(f,
then when we get to run real live spaceships they won’t let
you on . . . ’”

He broke off as he saw the Captain and went red with
embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled awkwardly.

“ That’s all right,” Captain Miller said, allowing her tone to
sound hurt. “ I’ve suspected that some of you think that this
isn’t a real ship, but that is a matter for the boys concerned —
I shall not tell them whether they are right or not.” Her eyes
ran over the two space-suited figures, noting that less than
half the seals were fastened properly, and the helmets were
not even connected. She went on sternly, “Let me remind
you, however, that whether you believe this to be a real ship
or not, the outside is probably a vacuum, or at least at an
uncomfortably low air pressure.

“ You have been trained in the use of spacesuits. See that
the ones you are wearing now are sealed, and properly!”

She brushed angrily past them and headed in the direction
from which the crash had come.

Danny and Billy were undoubtedly deeply hurt by her tone.
She could console them later, if necessary. At the moment

u6

NEW WORLDS

they were unaware of how lucky they were. They did not
have to bear the responsibility for a multi-million pound
ship, a crew of four highly-im mature adults and the safe
delivery of thirty-odd passengers. She went suddenly cold.
Supposing the crash had been in the passenger dormitory?
Her mind tried to shy away from that thought, but could not
quite , manage it.

If only she could be like the crew, just playing at space-
ships. Suppose this was just an elaborate test after all, a test
for intending psychologist-Captains as well as of their crews?
If she pretended to worry, went through the motions, but
secretly aware that nobody was going to die or be hurt . . .

But no. Miller told herself savagely, she recognised that
kind of thinking for what it was, an attempt to escape reality;
madness. The reality was that she was Captain of a damaged
— to an as yet unknown extent — spaceship en route between
Mars and Earth, and with the safety of some forty souls in
her hands. It was not a very nice reality, but there it was.

She passed through two bulkhead doors on the way forward
before coming to one which, because of a difference in air
pressure on the other side, would not open. The damage was
in the next compartment, then. There was a transparent
panel in the bulkhead door. She peered through it.

Because of the danger of secondary radiation from cosmic
rays the hull plating was kept thin, but it was extremely
tough. A few yards from the bulkhead Miller could see
where one of the superhard alloy plates showed a distinct
bulge inwards, and at the centre of the bulge a small, jagged
hole through which protruded what looked like a six-inch
length of buckled piping. In the immediate vicinity hoar
frost had formed showing where air was escaping to space.
It looked for all the world as though Starfire had been stabbed
with a length of piping; Miller could make nothing of it at
all. Then her eyes travelled further into this punctured
section of corridor, and she felt herself shiver involuntarily.

This was the stretch of corridor leading into the passenger
dormitory, and she could see where the air-tight door of the
dorm had closed automatically, as it was designed to do, an
instant after the corridor had heen opened to space. But when
Gordon had been escaping he had discarded the plastic har-
ness used to keep him in his hammock during free fall. It
had drifted across the threshold of the door so that it had
been unable to close properly. At one corner Miller could see
a hair-thin line of frost beginning to form.

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS

117

The passenger compartment was losing air, too.

There were over thirty passengers in there, she thought in
agony as she made for the nearest communications point;
thirty people drugged into sleep and utterly helpless. What
good were spacesuits to sleeping- men?

When she raised the Control-room Miller had to quell an
incipient panic there as well before she was in a position to
have her instructions carried out. But eventually she said,
“ Chris, train a vision pick-up on the air-supply panel of the
control board like a good boy, and connect it so’s I can see it
from back here. I want to check on something.”

She squinted into the tiny view-screen before her at the
needles which registered air supply and density all over the
ship. Only the punctured section was airless, but the dormi-
tory was losing it at a slow but steady rate. She did some fast
mental arithmetic and decided that the passengers, being
reasonably healthy specimens, might be able to live and
breathe for a little more than an hour.

And Danny, Billy and herself were cut off from the forward
section of the ship. She could lead them across the outer hull
in their spacesuits, of course, there were personnel locks con-
veniently placed for that to be possible. But the crew’s con-
ditioning was not meant to stand against a test like that.
Space to them was some rather uninteresting lights outside
windows in the hull which were used occasionally in conjunc-
tion with astrogation tables. Confronted with the stars all
around them . . . Well, she would probably end by leading
in two empty-eyed things which had once been men.

But the thought of what might happen to her crew — even
of what would happen to Danny — did not bother her half so
much as the picture she had of the passengers. There were
spacesuits all around them, but the- '* ' 1

They were not scheduled to wake up for another three hours,
so there was no hope of them being able to help themselves.
They were just not due to wake up. Period.

Gordon getting away had been bad enough, but when Star-
fire arrived with thirty frozen, blue-faced corpses aboard, that
would be the end of the Company for sure. Yet somehow
Miller could not feel very strongly for the Company, not now.

Ten yards awav a lot of people were dying without knowing
about it, and if they died she would d'e, too. Not physically,
maybe, but with her nature and training the loss of those

mocks, drugged, slowly strangling

ii8

NEW WORLDS

people would affect her only slightly less than if her “ boys ”
in the crew were to be wiped out to a man. Empathy, the
maternal instinct, whatever people chose to call it, could be
a double-edged weapon.

“ There’s a puncture in the hull 1 ” Danny’s voice broke in
on her suddenly. “ How do I get in? I’m supposed to fix
things like that, you know.”

Miller watched Danny tugging at the handle of the air-tight
door for several seconds before it dawned on her that here
was the answer, the problem and its solution stated in two
short sentences. In sudden excitement, she said, “ You can’t
open it because there is no air on the other side. But you can
drill through it, letting the air out of this section and so
equalise pressure. It would open then.

“ The airtight door behind us would automatically seal
itself then, but before drilling we could bring up repair tools
to fix the puncture. We would be safe inside our suits while
you did the repair job, then when it was finished I could get
the Control-room to bypass the safety cut-off and pump air
back into these two evacuated sections, and everything would
be all right again ...”

Miller felt like kicking herself for the scare she had thrown
herself into. Women might be practical in many ways, but
they were not good mechanics. And men thrived on
mechanical problems and in learning the skills necessary to
solving them. Women did not. Had that not been so, space-
ships might have been flying crewed entirely by females.

Danny had his suit helmet pushed back and his face pressed
against the inspection window. Suddenly he turned away
from it, looking frightened. He said, “ I - 1 can’t do it. I
can’t go in there. You know I can’t.”

But of course! The holed section was painted a vivid black
and white diamond design. Of the crew only Billy and her-
self could go there. The others were conditioned against it as
a precaution against them accidentally running across normal
adults during a swop-over. It was on the tip of her tongue to
tell Danny about the plight of the passengers and order him
to do the job, but she knew that it would be useless. The
conditioning was thorough.

But the idea was still workable, it must be. If it was not,
then there was one way that Danny could enter the holed
section and repair it . . .

She pulled her mind away from that idea, fast.

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS

H9

“ How about Billy doing it? ” she said suddenly. “ You can
instruct him from here. He’s allowed in there, you know.”

“ Billy can’t use a welder,” Danny stated. “ It’s tricky. He’d
probably burn his own feet off.”

Miller’s heart seemed to be stopping, paralysed by the dread
that was growing in her. She said desperately, “ If you ex-
plained it to me, could I do it? ”

“ Maybe,” Danny said, obviously embarrassed at having to
tell the Captain that there was something he could do better
than her. “ You’d have to practice a lot first. In a couple of
days, maybe ...” His voice mumbled into silence.

Miller pressed her hand over her eyes to hide from Danny
and Billy the struggle that was raging in her mind. Despite
her duty as Captain to treat each member of the crew with the
strictest impartiality, she knew that she was selfish enough —
weak enough, rather — not to do this thing to Danny if another
crew-man would have served in his place. But only Billy, the
steward, and herself could enter the holed section, and both
were useless for the job. Jimmy, the other Engineer, was out
of reach in the Control-room.

There was the intercom, of course, but even with a vision
link-up it was impossible to de-condition a man in that man-
ner. It had to be Danny or no-one.

But was it true, she asked herself desperatelv, that she did
not want to de-condition Danny, the man she had been
forcing herself to think of and to treat as one of her “ boys? ”
It had been a terrible strain maintaining that pretence, much
worse than she had believed it was possible for her to stand.
Was the truth not that she wanted this man as the intelligent,
strong and infinitely reassuring adult that he really was
instead of a hulking four-year-old? Maybe there was a chink
in her mental armour, maybe she was no longer suited for
this work . . .

Only in the worst possible emergency was she supposed to
de-condition a member of the crew. The shock of a normal
adult personality emerging suddenly into the, to him, night-
mare environment of a ship in Space could very easily destroy
that personality there and then. And if it did not do so, then
by the accident of sheer curiosity the person would look out
into Space. Everybody knew what happened then.

No prior eviolional attachments . . .

Miller took her hand away from her eves and said gruffly,
“ Billy. There’s a tool cabinet near the Life-capsule bay. I

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NEW WORLDS

want the welding gear, and bring a few spare oxygen tanks
for our suits.” She turned quickly. “ Danny, come over here
beside me. Real close. And watch my eyes, there’s a good
boy.”

Danny did as he was told: he must have thought it some
new kind of game.

If he takes the awakening shock all right, Miller swore to
herself. I’ll make sure Space doesn’t get him if 1 have to .. .
Aloud, she began the timed combinations of keywords that
would replace Danny’s four-year-old personality with his true
one. As she finished he gave a convulsive wriggle and his
hand drifted away from the wall-net which he had been
holding. If there had been gravity he would have collapsed.
He swallowed several times, looking around him wildly, then
burst out, “Hey! We’re on a spaceship!”

There was astonishment in his eyes, and excitement, but
that was all. He was all right so far. Miller saw him looking
at her uniform collar visible above the helmet line of her
spacesuit and forestalled the questions by speaking first.

“ Yes, we re on a spaceship,” she said quickly. “ Now listen
carefully, please, we’ve very little time ...” She began to
explain the predicament tney were in and the conditioning
of the crew which was partly the cause of it. She told every-
thing. She ended by trying to apologise for restoring his
adult personality in an environment which was all too likely
to cause its destruction.

He waved that aside, then, looking shrewdly into her face
he said, “ You’ve had a tough time with me being on your
ship, quite a strain, eh? Better for all concerned if you keep
calling me Danny, don’t you think? ” He trailed off as his
eyes took in the various items of equipment around him.
“I'm glad it Was me,” he said suddenly. “A real ship! I
wouldn’t have missed this for the world.”

His eyes came back to her admiringly. He went on, “ I
knew I was spacecrew, of course, we all did. But we never
remember being on a trip. One day we go into the briefing
hall and four or five weeks later we come out again — though
we think no time at all passes — and somebody tells us we’ve
been on a trip. The paycheck proves it, too.

“ But I never suspected that you were spacecrew, too. How
does it feel to be an inTepid spacewoman? ”

“ I haven’t time to tell you, even if I could,” Captain Miller
replied, strain putting a harsh note into her voice which she
had not wanted to be there. “ The passengers, remember? ”

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS

.131

Danny said, “I’m sorry.”

“No matter. But I hear Billy coming with the welding
gear. When he arrives, don’t say anything at all. Pretend to
be sulking about something — I won’t ask you direct questions
and you can simply ignore him. You see,” Miller explained,
“ your voice has deepened and there are marked changes in
your face and carriage. While talking to the others would
not break their conditioning, it certainly would make them
feel frightened and unsure of themselves. So stay quiet and
sulk, OK? ”

Danny nodded, suppressing a smile, and turned to examine
the hull puncture through the inspection panel. Miller
relieved Billy of the welding equipment and began checking
that his suit was sealed in readiness for the moment when the
section they were now in would become airless. She was
convinced that her worries regarding the passengers were
practically over. And she had an idea for keeping Danny
safe, too.

When the puncture was fixed she would tell Billy that
Danny was sick, and was to be treated as a passenger for the
rest of the voyage. He would occupy Mr. Gordon’s hammock
— Mr. Gordon having gone away — and take sedation with the
rest of them, and have no contact with the rest of the crew
whatsoever. That would take care of Danny all right, though
he would be like an old bear towards her for not allowing his
adult personality to see all over the ship. But when the Com-
pany psychologists got at him when he returned, he would
cease to remember that he had even been de-conditioned on
this trip.

A better way would have been simply to convert him into
an emotional four-year-old again, but that type of work could
only be done properly on Earth where the right facilities were
available.

A tap on the shoulder made Miller turn sharply. Danny
had his helmet in place and was motioning her covertly to
do the same. Puzzled, she did so.

“ I had to talk to you,” his voice squeaked from the helmet
ear-phones. “ It’s about the puncture. It can’t be fixed from
inside. I’ll have to go onto the outer hull.”

“ No! ”

“ But I’ll have to. What hit us anyway? It wasn’t fast
enough to make a clean puncture, and yet it had enough mass
to push a hole through the plating. The edges of the hole

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NEW WORLDS

are turned in and jagged — unsuitable for patching without
first cutting and planing down, and that couldn’t be done in
time to save the passengers. That metal is tough. The only
way of fixing an air-tight patch over it, without completely
replacing the hull plate, is to weld it on from outside.”

He sounded completely sure of himself: there was no other
way in which it could be done.

“ You can’t go outside in your present mental condition,”
Miller said desperately. “ There must be some other way.”
Danny’s head shook inside his helmet. “ I know what’s
supposed to happen to men who look at Space. I’ll be careful.
We could fit some type of blinker arrangement to my helmet
so that I could see just a small area directly ahead, and I’d
keep my eyes on the hull the whole time. I’ll be ail right,”
he ended drily, “ and I promise not to peek.”

Miller tried to argue. She advanced many wild and totally
unworkable ideas. She had to stop when the rather hurt and
puzzled Billy started putting on his own helmet to hear what
all the talking was about. Danny had the last word.

“ The passengers, remember? ”

They left Billy at the bulkhead door adjoining the holed
section with instructions to drill through it when they sig-
nalled that the repairs were completed. Air would then fill
the damaged compartment giving a check that the repaired
hole was not leaking before Miller ordered the Control-room
to equalise pressure there. It was on the way to the small
personnel lock that Miller made the decision to accompany
Danny onto the hull. Only by doing that could she make
sure that his curiosity did not get the better of him.

At the entrance to the stern airlock Miller painted out
Danny’s face-plate, with the exception of one half-inch slit at
eye-level. This she covered with a double turn of thick web-
bing. She then checked communications with Billy and the
Control-room, warned Danny against touching his blindfold
until she told him it was safe to do so, then led him out.

It was the first time Miller had been outside the ship during
flight — it was supposed to be unnecessary for anyone to walk
the outer hull at all. But the Starfire was packed with safety
devices for use in the most highly unlikely circumstances, so
all suits were equipped with magnetised boots, wrist-and
knee-plates as a matter of course. Miller was surprised how
quickly she was able to slide herself along the hull, even with
the blindfolded Danny in tow. And when she moved beyond

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS

123

the shadow of the port stabiliser, she was surprised again.
Unpleasantly.

Mr. Gordon had returned.

It was plain what had happened now. The Life-capsule in
which the escaping passenger had left so hurriedly had re-
turned. Like some diminutive swordfish attacking a whale it
had rammed the side of the Starfire at full acceleration, pene-
trating the super-hard hull with its fixed rod antenna. As well
as puncturing the hull the crash had forced the greater part
of the antenna, together with its mounting, backwards into
the Life-capsule like an irresistible piston. The things it had
done to their late passenger were not pleasant. Miller felt
suddenly sick.

Pieces of the capsule’s transparent canopy still clung to the
wreckage, some of them smeared with paint. Looking at
them and remembering Gordon’s last angry words to her —
swear words, mostly — Miller realised something which made
her feel even worse. She, herself, was responsible for Gordon’s
death.

When she had been working the manual control of the
Life-capsule bay, Gordon must have thought that she was
trying to kill him by opening the bay to space instead of
opening the inner door as she had been trying to do, hence
the foul language. He had panicked and left in the Capsule
before its transparent canopy was fully blacked out. Space
had taken him just as he was beginning the curve backwards
which would eventually have taken him to the ship following
in their wake. His time-sense paralysed, held like a bird by
the mesmeric stare of a snake, Gordon’s mind was already
dead before that initial curve became the full circle which
smashed him into the mother ship’s flanks.

There was a cruel son of justice about it, Miller thought
wildly. She had caused Gordon’s death. Had Gordon re-
turned to bring about the mental destruction of Danny,
her . . .

“What’s wrong? You’re' talking, muttering to yourself.
Something about retribution. Retribution for what? ”
Danny’s voice was brusque and just a little frightened. In-
stinctively his hands had gone up to the blindfold. “ What’s
happening, I can’t see? ”

“Don’t!” Miller cried. “Keep your hands down! I’ll tell
you what has happened . . .” Speaking quickly she described
the situation, then concluded, “The antenna rod ha's gone

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NEW WORLDS

through the hull plate. It’s twisted on the inside, so we’ll
have to work the capsule around a bit to pull it free. It will
be quicker that way than by sawing through the rod, I think.

“ Now,” she went on quickly, “ there's no reason for you to
see what you’re doing just yet. Ill guide your hands to a
good grip, then when I tell you, lift.”

They tugged and strained for several minutes trying to
pull the obstruction free, but in vain. Miller was glad that
they were not using the suit radios at the time, but a three-
yard length of cable connecting their helmet ’phones direct —
a sealed, two-way communications system. 1 he other mem-
bers of the crew would have wondered at all the sighing and
grunting being broadcast. Danny took a deep breath and
said, “All right, well try again. One, two, three, hup! ”

There was the snap of the antenna rod breaking, the sound
transmitted through their metal boots, then everything hap-
pened very slowly.

Like in a nightmare.

The battered Life-capsule broke free of the hull and rose
ponderously upwards. Caught off-balance Miller fell over
backwards, but managed to keep one foot and one arm-
magnet in contact with the hull. It was not so with Danny.
Danny had a good grip on the capsule, so good in fact that
he was unable to disentangle his fingers w'hen it began moving
away from the ship. Slowly, at a speed of no more than
three inches a second, it pulled him awav with it, the resistance
of his magnetic boots scarcely slowing it down as they parted
from the hull.

Miller, with the frantic slowness necessary if she was not
to lose contact with the ship, struggled to her feet and
made a grab for his retreating legs. But Dannv was kicking,
a purely reflex action, and her hand was knocked awav. At
that moment the lead joining their helmets was jerked from
its socket and all contact with him was lost.

Just out of reach she saw Danny wrap his legs around the
middle of the capsule, let go with one hand, then reach up
towards his blindfold with the other. Miller found that she
had launched herself towards him without even thinking
about it.

Her helmet struck his shoulder. Her arms wrapped them-
selves around his bodv at elbow level, the instinct to hold
on to something lending them desperate strength. He was
temporarily unable therefore to uncover his face-plate.

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS

»J

Miller pushed her helmet against his, reassuring him des-
perately — though she felt in dire need of it herself — and
begging him not to look out and so leave her all alone. With
a shock she realised that she was crying. But when her hand
found the disconnected helmet lead and plugged it in again,
her voice was almost back to normal.

“ We’re only about twenty or thirty feet from the ship’s
hull,” she said, forcing a note of confidence. “ Now if you
just stand up on this thing I’ll point you in the right direc-
tion, and all you need do is jump. Not too hard, of course — ”

“ I’m not jumping anywhere. Not unless I can see where
I’m going.”

He was very definite about it. His grip on the Life-capsule
tightened. The ship crept further away.

Their safety lines — all eighty feet of them — were attached
to lugs inside the personnel lock. They were not therefore,
completely detached from the ship. At the moment their out-
ward movement had been arrested by the safety lines and they
were slowly travelling the arc of a circle which had the lines
as its radius. Eventually they would wind themselves back
onto the ship. Or maybe, she thought, remembering the pas-
sengers, they could climb back along the lines and save time.
It would be hard to get a decent grip on the thin nylon lines
with the suit gauntlets, but. . .

She was about to outline this plan to Danny when she
mentally bit her tongue. It was not necessary to climb back
along their safety lines. They would get to the hull again
fast enough. Far too fast.

They were circling Starfire on the end of an eighty foot
line, moving at a relatively slow speed. But their radius as
the line wound itself around the hull was being shortened
steadily, which meant that their speed was steadily increas-
ing. Miller could not work the answer out in her head, but
she suspected that they would arrive on the hull so quickly
that they might not live through it. If the impact aid not
kill them outright it must certainly crack their suits.

She refrained from mentioning any of this aloud.

Miller watched the Starfire’s almost imperceptible rotation
eighty feet below them. Then it was fifty feet beneath them
and moving appreciably faster. They spun faster and nearer.
She kept telling Danny that everything was all right, when
secretly she wanted to cling to him and cry, as she used to
do, for him to protect her and not let anything hurt or

126

NEW WORLDS

frighten her. They kicked free of the Life-capsule, then the
individual plates of the hull were beginning to blur with
speed and they were ten feet away. They struck.

Only one thing saved them. The safety lines, now wound
together, had been caught loosely over one of the stabilisers.
In the instant before they struck the line had slipped off the
projection, thus allowing them more line just when they
needed it most. The result was that they struck the hull at
a relatively shallow angle and slid forwards until the tighten-
ing line brought them up with a jerk. Miller felt as though
she was one great bruise, but nothing seemed to be broken.
And Danny was all right, too. His choice of words while
telling her so was lurid.

“ Listen carefully,” Miller broke in. “ Walk in the direction
you’re pointed for twenty paces, that will bring you close
to the puncture. I’ll fetch your welding gear from the air-
lock and bring it to you. We’ve got to hurry! But whatever
you do, don’t try to see where you’re going.”

“ I won’t,” Danny said. He was breathing heavily.

Five minutes later his blindfold was off, but his eyes were
on the section of damaged hull plating and on the bright blue
flame of the welder. Miller stood over him, but with nothing
to do but watch that his attention did not stray away from
his job, her mind began to slip back to her main problem.
Or was it a dilemma, an insoluble problem that, far from
wanting to solve, made her want to go away to some dark,
quiet place and hide and forget it all. . ?

She was convinced that the passengers were already dead.
They must have died while Danny and herself had been in-
terminably circling the ship on their safety lines. There
would be an investigation that would very likely end in the
criminal courts. Thirty people dead because the Star Line
method of operating their ships could not cope with a one-
inch hole in the hull in time to save them. That was not
quite accurate, the passenger Gordon was the true cause of
the disaster, but they would not look at it that way on Earth —
their rivals would see to that. They would say that Captain
Miller was solely responsible for her ship and those within
her, and that Captain Miller was guilty of multiple man-
slaughter. And the trouble was that even if they acquitted
her, she would feel herself guilty for the rest of her life any-
how.

She had no friends. The big, warm-hearted man so grimly
working at the hull beside her would not want her after this,

THE LIGHTS OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS

127

nor his father. She had ruined them both, three genera-
tions of space-travellers, even though the last was the only
one to actually see Space. . .

It was very, very black when you didn’t look near the
Sun, and between the stars there was plenty of room to hide.
It was funny, but she had never really looked at the stars
before. . .

Velvet blackness and stars, were all around her, then they
flicked out of existence to be replaced by the interior of the
stern air-lock. Like frames picked from a film at random
and thrown onto the screen at normal speed, various sections
of the ship flickered into being around her and were gone
again. In most of the frames a white-faced and sweating
Danny was bent over her, holding her in his arms and trying
desperately to tell her something. Why, she found herself
thinking bemusedly, this shouldn’t happen to me, I’m a
woman! Then : I’ve been Space-gazing— my time-sense is
all snarled up. . !

Miller opened her eyes again to find herself still held pro-
tectively by Danny. She giggled suddenly, and said, “ I feel
silly calling you Danny, as if you were a kid.”

The grey, tensed face above her relaxed, but only slightly.
It still looked much older than its forty-five years. He said
with a great sigh of thanks, “ So you’re back. I thought I’d
lost you altogether. But listen. I don’t know what happened
to you exactly, I’m no psychologist, but it seems to me that
you had an insoluble problem and worked yourself into a
case of space neurosis to escape it. Well forget it. The
passengers are all fine, everything’s fine. We weren’t outside
the ship more than half an hour, no matter how long it felt
like. So your problem is gone. Understand? ”

The eyes looked long and searchingly into hers, found what
they were looking for, and the fear went out of them. He
said gruffly, “ You’re all right now.”

Miller replied by throwing her arms round his neck and
bursting into tears. She felt wonderful.

“ There, there,” he said, holding her awkwardly because
it was a great many years since he had held her like that.

“ You’ve had a bad time this trip, I’m not surprised you
cracked a little. Imagine foisting me onto you and expecting
you to treat me like a son along with the rest of them — me,
your own father. It was enough to tie that alleged mind of

128

NEW WORLDS

yours into granny-knots. And the Gordon accident on top
of everything else. . .”

“Look,” he went on softly. “The psychological balance

of this ship’s crew is shot to h , er, excuse me. The crew

still need you, but you need somebody to lean on a little
yourself as well. Don’t you think that I could fill that little
job? You keep the crew in line, and I keep you from running
off the rails. It will work, you know. I won’t go space-gazing
after seeing what it nearly did to you, be sure of that! ”

For the first time since leaving Earth Captain Miller felt
herself really begin to relax. This was going to work, she
knew it was, but there would still have to be precautions
taken. She said, “ You’ll have to sleep most of the time, Dad.
And keep out of the way — ”

She broke off as the intercom buzzed imperiously. Her
father’s surprised grunt was drowned by the wailing voice of
Chris blaring loudly from it.

“. . He broke it! He broke it! Jimmy did it! He
wound it up too tight and the spring broke and . . . and
now we can’t play aeroplanes or trains or anything and he
said he’d be careful and he’s a dirty sneak and . . . and . . .”

At that point the Starfire’s Communications Officer burst
into tears.

Captain Miller sighed, then forced her stiff and aching
muscles to propel her in the direction of the Control-room.
“ Spacct-ravel,” she muttered resignedly, “ is just one blasted
crisis after another.”

She could hear her father laughing softly as she left.

James White

ilMX

Rut wilt be out of print soon

The first four
NOVA NOVELS

★ THEODORE STURGEON

The JMeeaming Jetreli

* JAMES BLISH

nfuete of Eagles

★ A. E. VAN VOGT

The ME capon Shops of
-Esher

★ WILSON TUCKER

City In The Sea

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128

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Bi-Monthly

presents in the current issue (No. 21)
another long novelette by Britain’s
foremost modern writer of fantasy

The ffinfiiloin#

Of The H tu ltl

by JOHN BRUNNER

This is a vivid story of persecution taken
to its ultimate conclusion — revenge, but
the roots of the plot go far back in Time
when — perhaps - other Beings shared our
living space. Yet it is a story of Today,
vibrant with possibilities and carefully
worked along psychological lines.

Also new stories by :

★ Kerf ram Chandler
★ Brian It . Aldiss
* John Hippo. r

* Phillip Jtarlgn

* and others

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